


Wide-Open Country in My Eyes

by Anonymous



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angel Sex, Bisexual Dean Winchester, Castiel and Dean Winchester Need to Use Their Words, Dean Winchester is Bad at Feelings, Emotionally Repressed Dean Winchester, First Time, Getting Together, Gratuitous Star Trek References, Heaven, M/M, Masturbation, Post-Episode: s15e20 Carry On, Post-Finale, References to Dean's Tentacle Kink, Sam Winchester is So Done, Table Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 10:47:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 29,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29434824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Dean and Cas find each other in heaven. Eventually.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 5
Kudos: 95
Collections: Anonymous





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this was just supposed to be a couple thousand words, at most, of comedy fic about Dean and Cas awkwardly avoiding each other in heaven. Then I let my friend Mimi start catching me up on what I'd missed in the years since I'd rage-quit in the middle of an episode, and then I started feeling things, and here we are. And now that it's posted, I can finally commit myself fully to pretending the finale doesn't exist. God bless us, every one.
> 
> Also, the title is from Bruce Springsteen's "No Surrender".

He’s been here for—he doesn’t know. A few minutes, maybe, or twenty years? Time moves different, Bobby told him, and he was right. Dean tries not to think about it too hard for too long, because he suspects it’s just one of those things human brains just aren’t really equipped for processing. Anyway, he’s been here for what mostly feels to him like a couple of hours—long enough to drive to a bridge over a river near what he will later learn is his place, and meet Sam there, and say hey, but also, somehow, long enough to cross the bridge in a few minutes and drive for a few hours and eventually wind back at the Roadhouse where he started, with no sign of Sam whatsoever—before he brings it up.

“You mentioned Cas did this,” he says to Bobby while they’re fishing one day at the lake outside Dean’s place. “Helped with it.”

(Dean’s place is in this perfect spot—well, it’s goddamn heaven, of course it’s perfect, it just seems weird that there could be enough perfect spots for everyone. But he guesses it’s the same as how time moves, where if he thinks about it too hard it might make his puny human brain melt—right between a lake and a forest. He’s wandered around the forest a little; it’s just a few miles to his parents’ place as the crow flies, but mostly he drives there, which is longer, and it’s a mile further than that to the Roadhouse. Anyway, he and Bobby are just out on the edge of the lake, fishing, and Jack’s not too busy doing God stuff to join them, which is nice, too, but. Well. He’d kind of expected Jack to show up with Cas in tow, too.)

“Yep,” Bobby says. “If you were already here it was a weird time, when it all started folding together.”

“How could you even tell?”

“People,” Bobby says, and then he chuckles. “Well, it ain’t really all that funny, I guess, but people turned less...I wouldn’t wanna say they were assholes, exactly, but that wouldn’t be too far off.”

Dean laughs, too, then. “So less Camazotz, more like Earth, except a little nicer?”

“Camazotz?” Jack asks, and then grins. “I love that book.”

“Of course you do, man,” Dean says. “It’s a classic for a reason.”

“It’s not that bad, though,” Jack says.

“No,” Dean reassures him. “Hell, no. Definitely not now. But, you know, before.”

“Well, yeah, before, pretty much.” Bobby fishes another beer out of the cooler, and Dean hands him the bottle opener. After he’s popped the cap and taken a drink, Bobby continues, “I had some warning, at least. I guess most people did—angels showed up to explain it to them, let them know they were gonna ease us into it—but Cas showed up to tell me personally.”

“He did?” Something tightens in Dean on hearing that, because he’s been here for (again, by his perception, which may not be worth much) a couple days now and he hasn’t seen a single feather off Cas’s winged ass.

He knows Jack is looking at him, tries to be cool. This isn’t just the kid anymore, it’s God, he reminds himself. (Which, of course, means that if he told Cas to quit dicking around, he’d have to, probably, right? Not that following orders has been Cas’s strong suit for a while, but he likes Jack, so he might actually listen. So that’s something to keep in mind, if he’s ever desperate enough.)

“Couldn’t stay long, obviously,” Bobby adds. “Folding billions of heavens into one big one, _and_ making enough new angels to get the job done? Well, it ain't exactly an overnight job.”

And Jack smiles, says, “No, not at all. But we’re getting there.”

“You see?” Bobby asks. “Straight from the horse’s mouth. Big job.” And something in his voice, something gentle, almost like pity, makes the tips of Dean’s ears feel a little hot. From the corner of his eye, he sees Bobby slide a glance in his direction. Dean takes a long drink from his own beer and pretends he doesn’t notice. Which is stupid. There’s nothing he needs to be subtle about. Cas was—is—his friend, and if he had the time to visit with Bobby then it just seems kind of weird he hasn’t had it for anyone else. That’s it. That’s all.

That’s all.

“You know, there's a place you can see ‘em,” Bobby finally says, around the time that Dean’s ears feel like maybe they’ve gone back to normal. Whatever the hell that was about. “Not all at once, but best I can figure, it’s sort of like they still got their own offices, and there’s a lookout spot where you can see the...I dunno, I guess maybe it’s sort of like the elevators. Whatever it is, it’s the damnedest sight.”

“Oh!” Jack says. “Yes. It’s a good place for the new ones, while they’re learning things. Most of them are still getting used to having forms at all, you know.”

Bobby barely pauses at all to take that in before he says, “Sure.”

“Huh,” Dean says, and then, fortunately, something twitches, hard, at the end of his line, and he’s got reason to wave a hand and hush Bobby quickly before he’s grabbing his rod with both hands, because whatever it is, it’s strong.

“You know, Dean,” Bobby says, after they’ve wrestled a respectably-sized fish into a cooler, shut the lid tight over it, “y’aint wrong either way, but I gotta tell you, I kinda would’ve expected you to say Stepford.”

“Stepford?” Dean asks, quietly, trying to hint that Bobby needs to hush, that Jack needs to hush, that they both just need to let Dean hush, because he could still catch a few more interesting things and maybe he needs to think a little, too.

“As opposed to Camazotz,” Bobby says, a little impatiently, as if they’ve been talking about fictional dystopias all day and he can’t figure out where Dean’s head got to.

Dean grins, and the twist in his stomach loosens a little as he realizes Bobby isn’t gonna pry.

“Well, that book’s a classic for a reason,” Jack puts in, and Dean laughs a little.

“Damn right it is,” he says, clapping Jack on the shoulder. “What genius told you that?”

Jack laughs then, too, just a kid for a moment, and Dean sees Bobby looking at him, smiling, and the weird tense feeling in his gut is almost totally gone now.

* * *

Charlie shows up one day and says “I want to go to an aquarium. You feel like looking at some sea creatures?” and he texts Sam and Jack, and next thing he knows they’re in Chicago, because Charlie likes the Shedd Aquarium and, okay, he’s got nothing against sea creatures, but Chicago also has Hoosier Mama, whose apple pie is friggin’ unparalleled. But then they start talking about whales and he makes a _Voyage Home_ joke and that’s how he finds out that Charlie has only the most cursory knowledge of _Star Trek_.

He gapes at her for a moment, and then demands, “How can you call yourself a nerd?”

“Dude, how can you _not_ call yourself one?” Sam asks.

“Shut up,” he says to Sam, and Charlie laughs.

“I mean,” she goes on, “I didn’t live under a rock, obviously I’ve seen _some_. And of course I respect its place in the nerd canon, but—”

“Dude, you friggin’ lived an entire episode of it! ‘Kill us both, Spock’?” he asks. She wrinkles her nose and shrugs, and no, this is just completely unacceptable. “Yeah, OK, screw the fish, we’re going back home right the hell now to binge. I can’t be seen in public with you until we fix this. And how dare you dishonor the memory of Leonard Nimoy by flashing this—” he raises the live long and prosper sign—”without having watched it?”

“Dishonor his memory?” Charlie repeats. “Dean, this is heaven. I assume Leonard Nimoy is around here somewhere.”

“We could go visit him if you want!” Jack says. “He’s nice.”

“She doesn’t deserve to meet him,” Dean tells Jack, pointing an accusing finger at Charlie as he turns back to her. “I’m revoking your LLAP privileges until we fix this.”

“We came all this way,” Sam protests, and Dean snorts, because no trip is longer than you want it to be, and Sam knows that, which means he’s just being a little shit.

“‘We came all this way,’” he mimics. Charlie tries to hide that she’s snickering. “You can stay and commune with the sea life, Sam, Charlie and I have work to do. Jack, you wanna come with?”

The kid gives Sam an uncertain look, presumably because he knows where the real fun is and is just too polite to say it. Sam just sighs. “All right, let’s go,” he says.

“Dean,” Charlie asks, as Dean grabs her bag and shoves it at her, then pulls on his jacket, “isn’t there, like...a lot of it?”

“Yeah, well, guess we’d better get started, then, huh?” He’s feeling downright chipper about this. It’s gonna rule.

* * *

All of which is setup for the fact that they’re a whole season into their Original Series marathon the first time he sees an angel up close. Sam actually indulged them for a few episodes before giving up and going back to his place, because he is a giant baby with no stamina, so he misses it. Jack has dozed off, but Dean is more forgiving of that, because being God has to take it out of a guy. Spock is saying that he’s not totally in control of his actions, that he can’t explain further—and then suddenly something flickers in, brighter than daylight, and Dean feels a weird swooping sensation in his head when he looks at it, like simultaneously being cross-eyed and having vertigo— _it’s not supposed to fit here,_ he knows, somehow, instinctively, not supposed to fit into Charlie’s living room, even with its twelve-foot ceilings.

It’s light, and it’s a form, maybe, sort of humanish, and it’s eyes, and it’s waving tendrils of light, it’s _so much light—_

—and then it’s gone again, just as quickly. 

“What the fuck?” he says, jumping up.

Jack wakes with a start and blinks at him. “What’s wrong?”

“You spilled the chips, Dean,” is all Charlie says, irritated, barely even glancing at the corner where it appeared. “It was just an angel, chill.”

“ _That’s_ how they look here?”

“Sometimes,” she says, shrugging.

“Some—what? What just—Charlie, what the fuck?”

And now, in a sign that she’s really concerned, she actually picks up the remote and pauses. “Dean, seriously, you haven’t seen one before? I thought you had a whole—you know, angel thing.”

“I knew they looked different,” he says, “but...wait, an angel thing? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I think she means Castiel,” Jack offers, getting out of his chair and helping Charlie to pick up the chips. In a corner of his mind, Dean recognizes that he ought to help, too, but he’s currently way too freaked out, and also, frankly, annoyed that neither of them seems to see what the problem is, or even that there is a problem. Also—

“Yeah, okay, but how is Cas a ‘whole thing’?” he asks.

“Huh,” Charlie says, looking at Jack, who gives her a look that Dean has no idea how to interpret, before she looks back at Dean, this time with a little too much scrutiny. “Okay. I guess not. Well, so anyway, there you go. That’s about what they look like. I mean, not all of them, obviously; the number of heads or wings or wheels or whatever will vary, and some of them have other appendages, and once in awhile they might show up in human form, but I’ve heard that’s really only if they want to talk with you directly. Mostly they just kinda...” She gestures vaguely towards the spot where it had been. “Flicker.”

He gapes for a little longer—long enough for Jack to take the bowl into the kitchen and bring it back freshly filled before curling up in the chair again. Finally, apparently deciding nothing else is forthcoming from him, Charlie picks up the remote and hits play again. Really, to be fair, Dean doesn’t have any other questions, because he’s still just stuck on what the fuck?, which Charlie’s already done her best to answer. But also—”Seriously, what the fuck?” he asks again.

“Dean,” she says, pausing again, “‘fuck or die’ is a classic fanfiction trope, and since you dragged me into this whole project, I’ve been informed—” she waves her phone at him— “that this very episode is where it originated. You got me hooked, you should be proud! So what I’m saying is, we can do _Trek,_ or we can do angels, but I can’t do both at once, so let’s pick one.”

“ _Trek,_ ” he says, instinctively, because right now, that’s a lot less confusing. And then, “Wait, what about fanfiction? Fuck or—no, wait, dude, don’t say that stuff in front of Jack.”

“Dean, he’s literally God. I think he knows about sex. And fanfiction. And sex in fanfiction. _And_ you just dropped the f-bomb so hard you woke him up, so if he didn’t know that word before, he definitely knows it now.”

“I knew about it before,” Jack informs her. “He says it a lot.”

“See?” Charlie asks. “And as to your questions about a certain classic fanfic trope, I’ll send you some links that will explain everything.”

“No, you don’t have to—”

“Oh, no,” Charlie chirps, and her smile is so sunny that even Dean could almost believe it was totally innocent. “It’s my pleasure.”

His cell phone makes a lot of cheerful little noises on his drive home. While he's lying in bed, he checks his texts and finds his message history with Charlie filled with links to the Archive Of Our Own. Why the fuck do they even have the Internet in heaven?

* * *

Anyway, after that first time at Charlie’s, he starts to become a little more aware of them, sees them from the corner of his eye now and then, by the side of the road or in the next room or something, and he figures, eh, whatever, they just seem to pass through occasionally. Except one day he's just sitting down on the porch of the Roadhouse with a burger, and one appears over by the car. Dean blinks at the angel for a moment, and the angel blinks its many, many eyes back at him, and when the angel doesn’t move or speak or do pretty much anything, he finally just goes back to his burger, because he doesn’t really know what else to do and there’s no point letting it get cold.

He’s almost done with the burger when he realizes that the angel still hasn’t moved, and the reason he realizes that is that the angel speaks to him.

**IS THIS YOUR CAR**

"Yeah," he says, or tries to say around a mouthful of burger. “Sorry. Just a second.” He hastily swallows, but before he can say anything else, the angel disappears.

Dean spends a minute or two waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the angel to come back and explain what the hell that was about, but nothing else happens, and eventually, he goes back, once again, to his food.

**ARE YOU SURE**

His mouth is full of fries this time, and the angel is in the same spot by the car, this time staring at him with a head that looks like some kind of weird bird’s.

But by the time he gets out—not even bothering to swallow—”Why, who’s asking?” it’s gone.

Because, you know, that’s just what angels do.

Apparently.

* * *

Here’s one nice thing about heaven (apart from the fact that it’s, you know, heaven): since he’s got his own place, all to himself, he can do whatever he wants, anywhere he wants, up to and including jacking off anywhere at any time, without fear that Sam’s gonna walk in and start screaming about boundaries and biohazards.

It’s not like that’s all Dean does, he’s got plenty of other stuff going on. He fishes, he fixes the car—it’s definitely heaven, because somehow, when he didn't even know it was what he needed, something under his baby's hood doesn’t sound quite right, or someone will come driving along and break down and need his help. And then other days, when he didn’t even know _that_ was what he needed, the car will work perfectly, and there’s no one for miles, and he can drive as long and as far as he wants. Or Jo will come over and they’ll throw knives at trees. Or maybe he actually tries to bake something, because he’s collected a bunch of recipes over the years and he is...not great at it, because baking is a lot more fiddly than cooking, but he’s getting better.

Anyway, the point is, he’s got plenty of other stuff going on, it’s not like all he does is sit around jerking off all day every day. But, you know, on those occasional days when he _does_ just sit around jerking off, the fact that he can do it anywhere, anytime (and as often as he likes, because it’s heaven, and just like everything is as far away or as close as he wants it to be, his refractory period is now as long or as short as he wants it to be)—he’s not gonna lie, that’s a nice bonus.

But it starts to get a little weird quicker than he expects.

Dean’s not a complete idiot. He knows he’s lonely, and he’s capable of admitting that sure, maybe it’s not just a general loneliness, because he’s got his family, and he’s got more friends in one place at one time than he’s ever had in his life, but still, maybe he’s feeling a specific kind of loneliness. Maybe there’s one little spot of loneliness, one element that’s missing, and maybe all the ways in which he’s not lonely anymore are slowly making the boundaries of that specific loneliness all the clearer. Maybe it’s gradually—ever so gradually—becoming easier and easier to identify the element that’s missing, the person who’s missing.

But okay, this first time, after the encounter at the Roadhouse, maybe it’s just leftover angel weirdness. Maybe that’s all there is to it, maybe that’s why, when he’s sitting on the edge of the bed that evening and his hand winds up on his dick, every time he keeps trying to think of Rihanna, or Indiana Jones, or some generic hot chick with tentacles, or maybe if Rihanna banged Indiana Jones, and got bitten by a radioactive squid after Indy knocked her up with twins, who by the time Dean meets them have grown up to be an extremely hot chick with tentacles and her equally hot brother, also with tentacles—even that frankly brilliant scenario doesn’t really stick for more than a few moments, and his mind keeps going back to Cas.

Okay. No. All right. General angel weirdness probably isn’t the (only) reason. He’s in heaven, maybe it’s safe to admit it. He’s into Cas, he was into Cas for a long time, he can see that now, fine. But also, come on, can he just be horny about that in peace for a bit, without having to give it a lot of thought just yet?

Because goddamn, the thought of Cas—the thought of Cas’s hands on his hips, on the back of his neck, or the thought of Cas’s mouth on his mouth, on his chest, on his dick—that does it for him, it turns out. That _really_ fucking does it for him.

He feels okay after. He doesn’t really know what he expected. Like, on the one hand, it’s heaven, so you’d think it’d be pretty mind-blowing. But on the other hand, so far, his feelings are still just feelings in heaven. So while it’s definitely nice when he comes, afterwards Dean’s still just kind of lonely, and jerking off to the thought of Cas means that, once the post-orgasm haze has faded, his mind is right on track to return to the question of why the hell Cas hasn’t come to see him yet.

After he cleans himself up, Dean gets another beer and goes to sit out on the porch, and something flickers through his field of vision off toward the lake, something bright and moving and big, and the timing is enough to make him wonder, to make him a little afraid—  
Another flicker, long enough for him to actually see it this time, but before he can even let himself hope long enough to realize that he is hoping, it’s gone again.

“You’re a dick,” he says to the empty air, and then he sets down the bottle, folds his hands and almost says it, even begins, “And, you know—” and then he can’t quite finish it, just thinks it, after all. _You’re being kind of a dick, too, Cas._

* * *

A few days(ish? Maybe a few dozen years? Or minutes?) later, they’re working on an old truck and start talking about lunch, and then out of nowhere Bobby says “Hell, you ain’t ever been to Ben’s Chili Bowl, have you? Come on, boy, we gotta fix that,” and suddenly they’re in goddamn D.C., and a few minutes later Dean’s eating what looks like a hot dog covered in, among other things, goddamn chili, and Dean thinks he might try to relocate his home to D.C., ideally next door, because even being able to get here at the speed of thought is maybe too long a trip.

Anyway, halfway through their second half-smokes, Dean says, in what he thinks is a pretty casual tone—because why wouldn’t it be, really, he’s got no reason to get worked up about it—”So hey, Bobby, the angels.”

“Yeah?” Bobby takes a drink from his beer, eyes the menu, and Dean is pretty sure he’s just imagining that Bobby’s eyes darted over to him, but he looks back down at his own food, anyway.

“You said they have their own place?” he asks, quickly, and then, just as quickly, crams as much of his chili-covered hot dog into his mouth as he possibly can. (Not really a hardship.)

“Right,” Bobby says, nodding. “Haven’t tried to actually go there, myself, just looked at it, but like I said, there’s a sort of—I dunno, a lookout spot where you can see ‘em coming and going. Rufus found it. Hell of a thing, because they generally ain’t in their earthly forms. Well, you’ve seen ‘em here and there by now, haven’t you? You can imagine what it’s like when it’s dozens of ‘em.”

Dean nods. “Think you could show me sometime?” he asks.

Bobby looks at him just a little longer than Dean likes, but eventually he nods. “Sure. Like I said, it’s a hell of a thing.”

* * *

It is, indeed, a hell of a thing. Bobby drives them, and the road is the same as ever, but then he takes a fork that Dean realizes, in all his time here, all his time just wandering around, he hasn’t actually taken before. He knew it was there, it just didn’t exactly jump out at him. The road still just looks normal, until suddenly there’s a cliff up ahead and beyond it is just...darkness. Nothingness, but not, exactly; even from here, from this distance and inside the car, it feels strange and wild and _charged_ , and it makes him feel the same—like if he were to touch something, anything, there’d be a spark.

No angels yet that he can see, though. Only stars, distant and bright.

They stop about a dozen yards from the cliff’s edge, and Dean looks over at Bobby. “Is it safe?”

“Well, that ain’t exactly the word I’d use, but you won’t get hurt if you get out of the car, if that’s what you mean.”

“What else would I mean?” he asks.

Bobby opens his mouth, makes a couple of halting starts, well and it’s and they, and finally closes his mouth again. “Don’t worry about it,” he sighs. “You’ll see.”

So, with that very comforting statement to go on, Dean opens the door and gets out of the car.

And all at once he understands what Bobby meant.

It hits him almost immediately, like a huge, cold wave right to his face, the sense of this whirling nothingness that isn’t nothing at all, an emptiness that’s filled with possibility. It’s not pure chaos, but there’s a little bit of chaos in it, and it _sings_ , it sings deep down inside of him, not in his ears but in his goddamn bones. Dean collapses against the car, gasping for breath, and when Bobby helps him up, he realizes that his face is wet and can’t even bring himself to be embarrassed by it, because Bobby’s looking a little pale, himself, and his eyes are bright.

“See what I mean about ‘safe’ not being quite the word?” Bobby asks, kindly.

Shaky, Dean gasps out something a little like a laugh, and Bobby lets go of him, gives him a bracing thump on the back. “Shit,” Dean manages, finally. “What is that?”

Bobby looks out beyond the edge of the cliff. “Given what the kid said about it being a good place for the angels, my best guess? Creation.”

After a few minutes, something in him seems to have shifted; something is resonating, has gotten into harmony with the music. Eventually, he remembers that there is actually a reason he wanted to come here, but even as he looks at Bobby, his voice is sort of distant to his own ears. “But I thought you said this was where the angels hang out, or whatever they do.”

Bobby just nods back toward the expanse. “Look again.”

Dean doesn’t understand what he means, and even as the wind and the sound tug at him, his mind is a little clearer with the knowledge that there’s something specific he’s here to look for.

(Some _one_ , the music says in his bones, but then, his bones are so deep inside that he doesn’t need to be afraid that someone else will hear it, and so the knowledge doesn’t bother him as much as it might have.)

His eye catches on one of the stars, and he realizes that some of them are sort of...bluer than the others, sometimes, and then, with his next heartbeat, it’s like his gaze sort of telescopes, and he can see one of them in detail, and it’s _moving_ , it’s moving and it’s got multiple heads and wings and a lot of eyes and a handful of weird appendages made of light and now he can’t imagine how he ever thought they were just stars.

“Shit,” he breathes, and somehow finds the same angel in the void, and he can feel it looking back at him.

“Told ya,” he hears Bobby say, dimly. “It’s a hell of a thing.”

Since it’s just void, it’s hard to tell how big they are, or how far away. They don’t look that big. But it’s like standing on a hill and watching traffic far away, if each car had, like, a thousand things best described as eyes, and a hundred things best described as wings, and some of them have, like, wheels, and others have rings, and some of them even seem to have tentacles, which gives him some things to think about.

Also, none of those things actually _look_ like those things, exactly, like eyes or wings or wheels or rings or tentacles. It’s just that they register that way for some sense that Dean never knew he had, and it’s kinda like half seeing, a quarter feeling, and a quarter...smelling, maybe?

(Except maybe he’s used that sense before; it’s hard to tell because it’s a whole other sense that it makes his head hurt to try and think about too hard. And time is weird here, on top of that. But it’s not here that he knows it from, he’s pretty sure, not heaven. He experienced it someplace else, some other time, and all he knows is that it makes him feel confused and overwhelmed but not entirely in a bad way, that it’s a sense of shelter and it always has been, it was even more a sense of shelter the first time he experienced it. Just outside there was a cacophony of despair and anguish and terror but when that sense enveloped him he was safe from it, held tight and safe from the noise and the fear and the pain. He tries not to think about it too hard when he’s standing there looking out at the angels, but the next night he wakes up because, briefly—so briefly, he’s awake and it’s gone before he realizes what happened—his left shoulder feels hot.)

They’re still pretty big, though, and now and then, one of them will stop and blink some of its hundreds of eyes at the two of them, when it’s Bobby showing him, or the other two of them, twelve years/a few minutes later, when he and Charlie go to look, or the three of them when, in 150 years/six hours ago, he takes Sam and the tater tot to see.

He goes alone a couple of times, too. But no one stops, no one crosses over to his side of the void, and you can only feel the singing in your bones for so long at a time.

* * *

He’d like it to be an accident, the first time he says Cas’s name while he’s jerking off. If anyone ever asked him, he would say it was an accident. Thankfully, no one will ever ask him, because no one is ever gonna see or hear, and he’s sure as hell not gonna tell anyone. So it’s only him who knows, so it’s fine. It doesn’t really count. By the time he wakes up tomorrow morning, Dean will almost believe it was an accident himself.

Almost.

The truth is, that shit never happens by accident. Even during the best, most mind-blowing sex he’s ever had, he hasn’t said something by accident. And besides, he won’t say it in his bedroom, or on the couch, or anywhere else there are even windows.

Dean is fully aware of how stupid that is. It’s not like he’s jerking it with a lot of people around anyway. (And also—he locks this thought down before he can even fully think it—if, say, an angel wanted to show up while he was at it, that angel wouldn’t need to just wait outside and look in the window, wouldn’t need to knock or even just open the door. They could just come right in, just appear right here.)

But after he realizes that’s what’s happening—that he’s only doing this in the most private parts of his already secluded home—it becomes even more important that he keep it that way.

The shower is pretty nice, he tells himself. Great water pressure, hot water never runs out, it’s fantastic. The first time he does it, it could just be about how great the shower is. Jerking off there is a great way to end the day! A nice little coda to an evening.

But then it happens again, and another time, and then a few more times after that. Not all in a row, not every day, but after enough times, even he can finally recognize the pattern.

Maybe there’s just a weird part of his brain that needs to keep this secret. Just for the time being, just until he’s more used to it. Maybe—

_“Maybe,” Cas would say, with that little lopsided smile of his, with his heavy eyelids, with his hands on Dean’s waist—yeah, Dean can imagine the way the water would plaster his dark hair down, the way he might squint, a little, as the water ran into his eyes occasionally, “maybe you just wanted me all to yourself for a little while.”_

_And then, in the fantasy, Dean can’t see his face anymore because he’s too close, his body hot against Dean’s, his mouth pressing kisses at Dean’s throat, one hand on Dean’s waist and the other wrapping around him, sliding back and forth along his dick once or twice, lightly, almost delicately, like he’s just checking something, just testing this out—_

_“Is that it, Dean?” he asks, and even though it’s barely a whisper and the shower is louder, Dean hears him, feels the words if nothing else; Cas’s hand tightens just a little, he traces the head of Dean’s cock with his thumb, and asks again, “Am I right?” He moans a little as Dean kisses him, and Dean’s hips jerk, and still, even with the water beating down, he can hear it loud as a fucking marching band when Cas murmurs, against the corner of his mouth, ”Do you want me just for you, Dean?”_

_And then he fucking sinks down to his knees, looks up at Dean again with that sweet, goofy smile of his briefly, and then parts his lips and just sinks his fucking face onto Dean’s dick, his throat twitches a little, not quite gagging but not far off, and—_

“Cas, fuck yes, Cas, _fuck,_ ” he groans, and even though part of his brain knows he knows he’s just some sadsack jerking off in the shower, the truth is that when he comes, it’s still pretty fucking good.

* * *

It’s a couple days later, or maybe eighty years later. Who can say? But either way, there’s no fucking way it couldn’t have known Dean’s mouth was full this time.

What happened today was, Charlie pointed out that they never did make it through more than a little of the aquarium, and it’s been a little chilly lately and he’s in the mood for pumpkin pie. (Sam, apparently fearing he’ll end up having to watch Star Trek again, chooses not to join them this time. In fairness, he’s not wrong; they’re also trying to put off watching the first movie.)

Despite the fact that Dean doesn’t live anywhere near Chicago, as far as he knows, or anywhere near much of anything, it’s still not a long drive, so they spend a few hours (maybe?) looking at marine life, and then they get a pumpkin pie, and find a place to park close to the lake and just sit there and eat. It smells like snow outside but they’re warm inside the car, just watching the gray water and the gray sky and talking about whales, and then an angel is just fucking looming there, hundreds of feet high, like a friggin’ waterspout, half a mile offshore but speaking clearly enough for both of them to hear it anyway.

**ARE YOU DEAN WINCHESTER**

“You’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you?” is all Dean can manage at first, muffled, once a-fucking-gain, by his food.

It doesn’t seem to pay attention to that, just says, again,

**ARE YOU DEAN WINCHESTER**

So he says “yeah”, and instead of just disappearing the way it did before, the angel looks at him for a few seconds, and then it disappears, just as the first few tentative snowflakes are landing on the windshield, so small that they’re just water drops instantly and he’s not even sure he’s seen them but no, more of them fall.

“Dude,” Charlie says, laughing a little, “what the hell was that?”

“What?” he asks. “They just show up sometimes, remember?”

“Well, yeah,” she says, “but they don’t say anything, usually. I kinda figured they were just passing through or something, they never seemed specifically interested in me or whatever. Does that happen a lot?”

“I mean—” he shrugs, because he has no clue how to answer that. “Now and then, I guess?”

“Huh,” she says. “Weird.”

“Yeah,” he says. “No kidding.” He picks up his fork again, but he feels a little weird now, sort of tense, almost itchy with it, and the peace of the moment is gone. “Come on,” he says, putting the fork back in the box, because he needs to be moving. Needs to concentrate on something else. “We’ve dragged it out enough, you’ve gotta watch the first movie sometime.”

“Do I, though?” Charlie groans, even as she buckles her seatbelt.

The drive back seems longer, a little bit; long enough for Charlie to take a nap. After she’s dozed off, Dean keeps thinking about the angel, trying to figure out just what it was that he thought saw in all those eyes before it disappeared. It almost seemed like irritation.

* * *

They make it through _The Motion Picture_ and come out on the other side relatively unscathed, but about ten minutes into _Wrath of Khan_ he starts to feel a little tension, like something inside him is whispering that he should have thought this whole project through a little more before he started it. He manages to ignore it right up until the moment where Spock gets up and quietly leaves the bridge, and then Dean is hit by a horrible plummeting feeling in his gut, as he remembers, with vivid clarity, how this is about to go. Like, obviously he knew, but he remembers, viscerally, and suddenly it’s almost choking him.

“Bless you, Scotty,” Kirk says, as the Enterprise gets away just in time, and when Dean says “it wasn’t him, you dumbass! Look around you, for fuck’s sake,” it maybe comes out a little louder than he means for it to.

Charlie, who’d been rapt, starts, and turns wide eyes on him. “You know he can’t hear you, right, Dean?” she says, with a slightly nervous smile.

“Yeah,” he says, and then launches himself to his feet, saying, “sorry. Yeah. I’m just gonna grab another beer.”

“It’s the climax!” Charlie says, grabbing the remote and pausing.

“I’ve seen it before,” Dean says, picking the remote up from where she put it down and hitting play again.

“You’ve seen it all before,” she protests. “That’s why we’re watching, remember? You’ve seen it and I haven’t, and it’s a huge gap in my knowledge as a nerd?”

“You’re missing it,” he says, hustling from the room, and he can feel her watching him suspiciously, but she doesn’t say anything more.

But while he’s in the kitchen it gets a little too quiet, and he puts off going back as long as he conceivably can, but that’s not actually very long, and when he does go back out to the living room, of course, she’s paused it.

“Dean, is there something you wanna talk about?” she asks, blunt but not unkind.

The denial seems to stick in his throat for a moment. He takes a drink from his beer, and that helps to free it. “Nothing,” he says, but she’s a little slow to pick up the remote again.

The tension in his gut doesn’t dissipate. And when stupid asshole Kirk finally notices the empty chair, when the clueless idiot finally, finally figures out that something’s wrong, it’s too fucking late. And goddamn Spock is so fucking calm about it, so _resigned_ , like it’s right, like it’s _okay_ , like any of it will be okay—the needs of the many outweigh then needs of the few, fine, all right, that works in theory, but—”or the one,” Spock says, but that’s a lot easier to say when you’re not the one who’s going to have to live with this, did Spock ever fucking think of that?

“I have been, and always shall be, your friend,” Spock says, and Charlie makes a quiet little noise, like a gasp.

“Wow,” she says. “I mean, in Vulcan terms, that’s—wow.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, roughly.

“And the hands?” she asks. “I mean—isn’t that, like, kissing for Vulcans?”

Fuck, he hadn’t even thought of that, and he just hums an agreement, because he doesn’t know what to say, except then Kirk doesn’t say anything either, and he always kinda liked Kirk, but right now, he hates him. Because seriously, what the hell is wrong with the guy? “Say something, you stupid fuck,” he mutters, but Kirk doesn’t, the stupid fucking asshole, and then it’s too goddamn late.

He can feel Charlie’s eyes on him when Kirk’s voice fucking breaks during the eulogy, so he drains his beer to stop himself saying what he’s thinking, which is, _oh, yeah,_ now _you’ve got something to say, you useless asshole_.

(Never mind that that puts him one up on Dean, who in all his time here still can’t remember—still can’t remember _that_ and think of a single goddamn word that might be enough.)

“Okay, really glad we’re doing this as a marathon,” Charlie says, when it’s done, and leans over to nudge him with her arm. “Come on, man, let’s restock on snacks and get our _Search for Spock_ on.”

He can tell she wants to ask, but she doesn’t, thankfully; just drags him to the kitchen to grab them both more beer while she puts another bag of popcorn in the microwave.

But when they sit back down on the couch, she nudges him again. “Hey, so, whenever you _do_ want to talk about it...”

“Yeah,” Dean says, as he makes a show of picking through the bowl of popcorn for the pieces with the most electric-yellow butter coating on them. “I know.”

“Okay,” she says, and picks up the remote once more.

“Hey,” he says, and when Charlie looks over at him, the smile he manages isn’t huge, but it isn’t fake, either. “Uh, thanks.”

She just smiles back, and then takes the bowl from him. “Yeah, well, don’t think you get to hog the popcorn just because I feel sorry for you about your Mysterious Manly Pain.”

“Oh, so I spill my guts or I starve? That’s harsh, Charlie.”

She laughs, and when Dean makes a grab for the bowl, they get into the stupidest goddamn slapfight ever, and when she finally hits play on the movie, even though it starts right up with that fucking scene in the engine room, as if anyone could fucking forget, it’s a little easier to watch this time.

Especially since Charlie’s picking popcorn out of her hair and making disgusted sounds when he just picks up whatever’s fallen onto the ground and pops it into his mouth. “What?” he asks. “It’s heaven, how dirty can it be?”

When they finally get to _Voyage Home_ a couple hours later, he’s feeling almost chipper again.


	2. Chapter 2

So that’s about how it goes for...who knows? For a few days, for a few centuries, it’s hard to tell.

But then, one night, Bobby and Karen have a bunch of them over for dinner, and an angel flickers into the kitchen, and mostly they’re all cool with it, just sort of blink through the doorway at the angel for a second. Then, when nothing more happens, everyone goes back to dinner. But Dean knows the angel, he’s sure he knows him, sure he’s the same damn angel from before. From multiple times before, actually. So of course, being Dean Winchester, he’s gotta cause problems, and just as it’s flashing out, he says, “Okay, man, what’s the deal? You got more questions, or what?”

Another flicker, something like a hum just at the lowest edge of his hearing, except maybe it’s actually a little below, just something he feels in his sternum, like heavy bass, or maybe it’s just an emotion that he can best compare to that sensation. The angel’s back, somehow fitting into the room despite being hundreds of feet high, which, as always when they appear indoors, he doesn’t want to think too hard about that because it makes him feel a little dizzy. And also, more immediately, despite not having eyelids on most of them, the angel is somehow narrowing its hundreds of eyes at him in a way that makes his heart stutter, just for half an instant, really too fast for him to notice except to know that _something_ just happened, and maybe if he had a little quiet, a little time, he could figure out what it was. But then it’s gone and Ellen is saying, unconcerned, “They just pass through sometimes, Dean, you must’ve seen ‘em.”

“Yeah, no, I know that,” he says. “But that one—”

“Which one?” Sam asks, frowning.

“The one who just popped in and stopped long enough to give me a look like I ran over his cat, are you kidding me?”

“Obviously we saw it,” Rufus says. “What we’re not getting is ‘that one’. You’re saying you recognized it? You can tell them apart?”

This has to be a joke, but Dean looks around the table, and they’re all looking at him like he’s the—well, no, actually, they’re not looking at him like he’s the idiot, they’re all looking at him like for once he’s not the idiot, and they’re all as confused by that as he is.

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s not hard.”

“It really kind of is, Dean,” Sam says slowly. “They’re all just wings and eyes and weird appendages and emotions.”

“When they’re this close, I have a hard time looking at ‘em for too long,” Bobby agrees.

They’re fucking with him. They have to be. Dean laughs a little, shakes his head, tsks reprovingly. “Wow, lot of anti-angel bigotry in the room. ‘Ooh, they all look the same! Ooh, don’t make eye contact!’ I am very disappointed in all of you.” But no one else laughs, and so finally he has to laugh again, looking at their bewildered faces. “Seriously, it’s not that hard. Especially that one.”

“That one?” Mom repeats, her brow furrowing.

“That one,” Sam echoes. “Dean, this angel’s appeared to you multiple times?”

“‘Appeared to me?’” Dean snorts. “It ain’t that fancy, Sammy. He shows up, he gives me the ol’ hairy-hundreds-of-eyeballs, maybe asks a weird question or two, and then he vanishes.”

“You keep calling it ‘he’,” Sam says. “How can you tell—”

“Sam, I get that we don’t wanna misgender the incomprehensible celestial beings but just—I know him, okay? I don’t know how I know, but I do. Like I said, he shows up, points the high-beam eyes at me, maybe asks me a weird question or two, and then he disappears again and _Jesus fucking Christ his eyes_.”

Dean’s hands are shaking as he pulls the napkin from his lap and jumps from the seat. He’s an idiot, he’s such a fucking _idiot_. God, he’s just the greatest idiot in a whole extended clan of idiots, judging by the bewildered looks everyone is giving him. Although as he grabs his coat and bolts for the door, yelling “good-dinner-thanks-bobby-and-karen-great-to-see-you-all- _jesus-christ-I-will-kill-that-asshole_ ”, he thinks he hears Sam make a _Eureka_ -type noise, so maybe he’s put two and two together, too. But it’s hard to know, because it’s like there’s a ringing in his ears, he feels sort of bright and trembly and everything looks a little sharp at the edges and he has to force himself to take a breath, and then another, try to steady himself enough that he can start the car.

And then he just fucking floors it. He doesn’t know where he’s going; home, he guesses? The most important thing is that he needs to go, needs to be somewhere that isn’t surrounded by people he loves, someplace where no one’s going to see him—or maybe just someplace where no one’s going to be caught in the blast radius, because he feels like he’s going to fucking explode.

* * *

Dean isn’t sure how long he drives for; his place is only a few miles away, but time is all fucked up here anyway, it could be a century or it could be ten minutes, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. He hardly notices the road, it all looks the same, just endless bright forests and rays of sun shooting out from behind enormous thunderheads and distant mountains.

There’s a clearing about halfway between his place and the Singers’. Dean’s heart has stopped racing quite as hard as it was as he rounds the bend and the clearing comes into view, and he sees that it’s filled with wildflowers. He’s not sure if it was when he went over there for dinner, and—and why the fuck does that even matter? It doesn’t, but something about it just digs into him—the fact that he doesn’t know, that they might have been there for a month or they might have just appeared the second before they came into his field of view.

He should just go home, but something about it seems like a good place to stop, and even though he’s calmed down a little he’s also still too pissed off to even be embarrassed about the fact that he’s just stopping to look at some flowers. So he gets out of the car and slams the door so hard it’s a miracle the window doesn’t shatter and nope, never mind about the “calmed down a little” thing, his heart is racing again—

“CAS!” No one hears him but this bucolic-ass field, the sunshine and the fucking _wildflowers_ and no, fuck no, fuck that shit, fuck this peaceful shit. Dean’s mouth is full of something hot and bitter and dry. “CAS!” He didn’t know he could feel this way here, could feel this whatever it is, he isn’t sure himself—it’s not just anger, it’s more than anger—“CASTIEL, GODDAMMIT”—it’s a tight, hot feeling in his chest, in his throat, like anger but also like terror. He hates it, he hates it, he shouldn’t even be able to feel this here, should he? It’s fucking heaven, he shouldn’t be able to feel this, he shouldn’t _have_ to feel this, this terror and anger and the grief, that’s what it is, it’s fucking grief. He feels like maybe he wants to puke, or maybe like his heart _is_ puking, just projectile-vomiting all over the rest of his guts.

Dean’s hands are shaking again, and he curls them into fists and then tries to clasp them, tries to slow his breathing, tries to do this right. But he can’t do it, he just wants to punch every single one of the smug fucking wildflowers around him. Somehow, though, something in his soul shifts, and even as he starts shouting again, it’s a prayer now—“I FUCKING KNOW IT’S YOU, CAS, I KNOW IT’S BEEN YOU THE WHOLE TIME, AND IF YOU DON’T GET DOWN HERE, I SWEAR I WILL DRIVE STRAIGHT OFF THAT CLIFF, AND I WILL FIND MY WAY TO WHATEVER LEVEL OF HEAVEN YOUR GODDAMN OFFICE IS IN, AND I DON’T CARE HOW MANY ASSES YOU HAVE IN YOUR TRUE FORM, I WILL KICK _EVERY SINGLE ONE_ —”

There’s a rush of wind around him, sweeping past him, a wind that hums, just the tiniest bit, in his bones. And this time, behind him, this time, this time the voice isn’t that majestic echoing through his every cell shit. This time, it’s just a soft, familiar, “Hello, Dean.”

His heart stops puking, maybe his heart just stops, literally, because hey, he’s already in heaven, what’s his heart stopping gonna do, kill him?

Maybe it’s some lingering angel shit because Dean can taste it, he can taste his feelings now, he can't totally name them, but he tastes something sort of peppery, and beer that’s gotten a little warm, and he tastes pecan pie with chocolate, the way he likes it, but Sammy and Mom and everyone else he knows complains about, so Dean just gets plain pecan pie because everyone else wants it but god sometimes he just wants chocolate pecan pie, just for himself. He tastes something hot and bitter, and he tastes salt water.

And when he turns around and sees him standing there it all he can say is “You fucking asshole, you _fucking asshole_ , Cas, _fuck you_ ,” even as he’s tackling the fucking asshole in question, shoving him against the side of the car, Cas still and pliant beneath his hands. Dean’s face feels hot, his throat feels like something’s squeezing it from the inside and also a little from the outside, and he grabs the fucking asshole by the collar and—

—and just stares at him, just tries to remember how to breathe, how to make words with his mouth, or even how to find words out of the depths of his brain and then make them with his mouth.

“Dean—”

“Shut the fuck up,” and it’s the worst fucking thing, his voice fucking breaks as he says it, he can’t continue because he’s fucking crying and it’s truly, spectacularly awful. The sun seems a little less warm on his back, and for a second he thinks he hears thunder, but maybe it’s just his heart and his own stupid fucking _sobbing_ , he’s just gasping for breath and his face is fucking wet even before the clouds get darker overhead.

After another few moments of silence, Cas takes a deep breath, and Dean kind of wants him to say something, but he also isn’t sure that his skin won’t catch fire if Cas does say something. But Cas doesn’t say anything, just moves his arm, a little, slowly, like Dean’s a skittish animal, until his hand is on Dean’s shoulder, right over the place where Cas first marked him, the place where he last touched him—

“Why?” Dean asks, finally, around the thing squeezing his throat shut, when he’s pretty sure he’s not gonna bawl anymore, and Cas’s hand is on his shoulder. He tries to ignore the dampness he feels on his skin; the day has gone grayer around them and maybe it was thunder he heard, maybe it’s just a little rain on his face. “Why didn’t you just fucking tell me?”

Something shifts in Cas’s face, subtle, he couldn’t possibly say what the change was but it just wrenches at him inside. Cas opens his mouth, just a little, closes it again, and then takes a breath, and opens it once more. “I wasn’t sure—it’s hard to explain.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Dean releases Cas, finally, though his hands seem stiff, like they should unfold with a rusty-hinge shriek, like they’ve been hanging onto Cas’s coat for so long they’ve forgotten how not to do it anymore. He laughs a little. “It’s hard to explain? Oh, that’s great, Cas, that’s just really friggin’ great.”

He hears movement, turns around, and sees that Cas has slumped down a little, that he’s staring at the ground. “I’m sorry, Dean,” he says, softly, so softly that Dean isn’t sure he heard him at first.

“You were here. You were here so many times, and you just—what, you thought I didn’t—did you think I didn’t want to see you?”

“I—” Cas swallows, and Dean is caught up, for just a moment, in the motion of his throat. “I thought that perhaps...it’s complicated, Dean.”

“Jesus, you are just really one for dodging the question today, aren’t you?” Dean snaps. “It’s hard to explain? It’s complicated?”

“I assumed that if you needed help, you would pray. Since you didn’t—I shouldn’t have been bothering you. I’m sorry. I just wanted—”

“I thought you were busy! Rebuilding heaven or whatever! Or—or maybe you were all fucked up from the Empty and wanted time to yourself, or maybe you just...” _Didn’t mean it,_ he can’t quite manage to say, _had time to realize you could do better, didn’t mean it that way, didn’t mean it, didn’t mean it, didn’t mean it._

Cas waits for a moment, and when Dean doesn’t finish, Cas says, simply, “You were with people you love.”

And fuck, _fuck,_ Dean just feels even worse at that. His heart starts puking all over again, he wants to punch the fucking _moon_. His hands are shaking and he has to bury his face in them because it’s all too much, he can hardly breathe, and he just has to listen to the smug dickhead birds singing their smug dickhead songs, but fewer of them now, as the wind picks up and the clouds get heavier, and their smug dickhead songs maybe sound a little less smug now.

“Yeah,” he says, finally, and if he had any room left for more feelings he’d be humiliated at how small his voice sounds. “Yeah, but _you_ weren’t...”

He hears clothing rustle, softly, and then one of Cas’s hands settles, light as a feather, on Dean’s wrist. He tugs at it, gently, ever so gently, and Dean lets him, lets Cas pull his hand away from his face, but Dean moves his other hand to cover his eyes, still, can’t look at Cas as he tries to breathe through whatever this is.

“So,” he finally says, “so you were just, what, waiting for me to figure it out? Waiting to see if somehow I wasn’t gonna be a fucking idiot for once? I’m a moron, Cas, you know that, you know I’m worthless when it comes to—”

“Don’t say that,” Castiel says, and the hand he has around Dean’s wrist tightens a little, not hard enough to hurt, just hard enough for him to realize how easily it could hurt. “I don’t like it when you talk about yourself like that, Dean. Please don’t do it. You’re so much more intelligent—so much more everything—than you’ve ever given yourself credit for.”

Well, that just kind of knocks Dean’s feet right out from under him, metaphorically speaking. He doesn’t know how to respond to that, and all he can do is mutter, quietly, “screw you,” and try to shake Cas off. “You don’t get to tell me—do you remember the last time you tried to say something like that to me? About how much better I am than I think? Because the way I remember, it didn’t end great for either of us, but especially you. Maybe—maybe you should be more careful saying shit like that, huh? Screw you,” he concludes, fully aware of how fucking weak that all was but really, it’s all in the delivery, right?

He doesn’t know exactly what kind of a reaction he was expecting. Probably just more quiet staring. Maybe, if he’s really lucky, the bastard will get angry at him and they can scrap it out and Dean can just get rid of some of this awful tension sizzling through his brain and his chest and his hands and his—everything.

But what he gets is Cas moving quickly, almost violently, to face him, dropping the hand he’s holding and grabbing hold of his shoulders and pushing him against the door of the car, fucking pinning him, so close that Dean can feel his breath, and then kissing him. Hard. Fucking _ferocious_. The shock of it ricochets through Dean, and he’s just starting to kiss back, just feeling his lips start to part, when Cas breaks it. But then his hands are on Dean’s face, framing it, forcing Dean to keep looking at him, and he just says, “I meant it. Understand that, Dean. I meant all of it, and I would do it again.”

“No,” is all Dean can manage, tries to shake his head, but Cas won’t let him, just holds him in place, unbreakable, inescapable. “Cas, no. You couldn’t. You can’t. No.”

For half a second, he’s overwhelmed by fear that Cas will ask him to clarify what he couldn’t do, whether he couldn’t sacrifice himself again or couldn’t have meant _that_ or what. But he doesn’t make Dean say it, he does something even worse than that: he says, mercilessly calm, with Dean’s face still held tight in his hands, “Yes, Dean. I could, and I did, and I would, and, if by some chance it should ever again be necessary, I will.”

“But you said—what you said—”

“Every word, Dean,” as he leans even closer, until his forehead is resting against Dean’s. “I swear to you. _Every word._ ”

This is even worse, somehow, than the anger. This is—he doesn’t know what it is. It’s almost like terror; it’s not, not exactly, it’s not terror in and of itself, but it sets off a terror in him. Dean feels caught in the gaze of something huge, something on a cosmic scale. It makes him want to run, not even take the car, it’s older than that, this part of him, deeper, unable to think in terms of machines. It just says to run. Maybe Cas knows that, sees it; maybe that’s why he’s hanging onto Dean so hard.

“I love you, Dean,” he whispers. Dean’s tried, over and over again, to think about what he would say if he could do it again, if he could have that moment again. Even when he wasn’t thinking about it directly the question was in him, he knows that now, it’s been hovering there in some part of him, but he can never seem to think about it for very long. It’s like trying to look at the sun, too big and bright to take in. None of the words ever seemed right, and now he can’t think of any words at all.

The thing pinned under Cas’s gaze, the thing inside that wants him to run, it just seems to burst, overloaded, overwhelmed. He still doesn’t understand, it’s like his brain just hits a wall. The field, the world, everything seems to go silent, to hold its breath with Dean. He’s waiting, he realizes dimly, for something to happen to Cas.

One moment turns to the next, which turns to the next, and nothing happens, nothing takes Cas, he doesn’t change, it’s not a trick or a trap, his eyes just stay that same unblinking blue. It should make Dean relax, the fact that nothing happens, but it doesn’t; he only feels himself tensing more and more with each moment, just waiting, waiting for the twist, waiting for whatever is going to destroy this to just fucking do it already.

Apparently the twist is that this time, he’s the one who’s gonna destroy it, and he’s gonna do it by just being too goddamn useless to say anything. He gapes like a fish on a dock for a little longer, and then, finally, Cas sighs. He releases his face slowly—so slowly, his thumbs dragging along Dean’s jaw—and takes a breath, and steps back a little.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I made you uncomfortable.”

Dean laughs a little at that, half-hysterical, and then as Cas steps back again he grabs his hand as thunder rolls, low, across the sky. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“I don’t understand,” Cas says, and Dean is just petty and human enough to be a little glad that someone else is feeling that way for once.

“I mean this better not be a goodbye, you dickhead, not again.” What’s happening is way beyond Dean. It’s somewhat comforting to know that it’s at least slightly beyond Cas, too; makes him feel a little less pressure to figure it out right this minute. “You’re not just gonna fucking leave again.”

“I have—”

“What, you got a lot of paperwork back at the office? Poker night with the other angels? You got a hot date?” Jesus, why did he say that, because it occurs to him now that maybe he _does_ —

Cas gazes at him for a moment longer than it feels like he needs to before he says, slowly, “No.”

“Yeah, well, you do now,” Dean says. Jesus, why did he say _that_? “Get in the car. We’re not done.”

Cas looks down, at where Dean is still clutching his hand, and then up at Dean’s face again. “All right.”

“Okay,” Dean says, too, and then, unnecessarily, “good.” Another moment, and then another, and then, carefully, he lets go of Cas’s hand, digs the keys out of his pocket and gets into the car. There’s a flash of lightning, distant. The rain is starting to spatter over the windshield, gentle fat drops ahead of the real storm. He doesn’t realize he was holding his breath until Cas gets into the passenger seat, and he can let it out. And finally there comes the thunder, rolling across the sky.

* * *

Time moves differently here, but there’s still enough of it stretching out on the drive that Dean starts to feel like an idiot after they’ve been driving in silence for a little bit. He almost wishes Cas would say something, anything that would let him get riled up again, but the fucker doesn’t, of course, that would make this way too easy. He just sits there, and now and then Dean can feel his eyes on him.

By the time he gets home the rain is coming down in sheets. Dean’s discomfort with the awkward silence has had time to turn into irritation with Cas for not saying anything else, for just keeping his mouth shut instead of saying something else about divine plans, or getting swallowed by some monster, or sucked into some other dimension, or just disappearing like a feathery thousand-eyed asshole the way he’s been doing every other fucking week since Dean got here, it feels like. And now his irritation has had time to work itself all the way back up to anger again, and he’s almost ready for round two when they pull into the drive and Dean sees his brother on the porch.

That irritates him even more, as does the fact that he knows it shouldn’t, because fine, whatever, Cas is Sam’s friend too, sure. But Cas hasn’t spent the last several decades just hovering around _Sam_ whenever the hell he feels like it without saying a goddamn word about the fact that it’s him.

Sure enough, even as he slams the car door and runs through the pouring rain to the porch, he can see the little shit’s face lighting up with a big goofy smile, like this is all just easy, like it’s just a big happy reunion and that’s all. Something about that just pisses Dean off, and he studiously ignores the two of them as Sam squeals like he’s a fourteen-year-old girl and Cas is the sensitive one in some goddamn Korean boyband. Sam wraps Cas up in a hug while Dean opens the door and stomps inside, shucking his jacket and shoving it onto the coat tree with as much violence as he can possibly put into the action, and then seething all the way to the kitchen, where he grabs a beer and sits at the table and waits for Sam to calm down so he can politely tell him to get the fuck out.

It’s almost a relief when Sam sweeps into the kitchen after him, all offended, and asks, “Okay, man, what’s up? What are you doing sulking in here?”

“Dean’s angry with me,” Castiel says from behind Sam, calmly. “And possibly also uncomfortable because of something I—”

“Yeah, OK, that’s enough,” Dean says, because good God, do they not need to get into that right here in front of Sam, who will probably want to find some dead therapist for couple’s counseling and then start planning their goddamn wedding. “If you two are done with your little reunion special, Cas and I have a few things to hash out. So if you don’t mind...”

“Cas, I actually think I need to talk to Dean for a couple minutes, first,” Sam says. “Why don’t you wait on the porch?” Cas looks from one of them to the other, opens his mouth, closes it again, and then nods and goes back outside.

As soon as the door closes behind him, Sam rounds on Dean. “Seriously, Dean, what the hell is with you? This is great, I would’ve thought you’d be over the moon about this.”

“Yeah, well, like I said, Cas and I've got some things we need to talk about.”

Sam squints at him for a moment, and then makes a disgusted noise. “God, are you really gonna throw a tantrum because the guy didn’t come to see you the minute you got here? You know Jack said most of the angels are still new, Cas has been busy—”

“Oh, screw you, you have no idea what he’s been doing. He’s come to see me plenty, Sam, _that’s_ my goddamn problem, and he just didn’t have the...I dunno, whatever they have instead of balls, he didn’t have enough to tell me it was him.”

He’s expecting Sam to argue more. Maybe part of him actually _wants_ Sam to argue more, because something in his chest and his shoulders and his throat feels tight in a way that, in his experience, only fighting and fucking can fix, and since this is his brother only one of those is an option, but when he’s left alone with Cas—yeah, okay, maybe, _maybe_ it could go either way.

And Sam opens his mouth, all ready to give Dean the argument he needs...

...and then he just sighs, in that way he sometimes does since he’s gotten here, the way that makes him look like there’s another him layered over top, lines on his face and gray in his hair.

Which only makes it worse. There’s a surge of anger, and also a sense that the anger is just the part of the iceberg that you can see above the water, that below it is something much bigger and heavier and colder. Because he knows this is what he never got to see in the world, that his brother lived a whole goddamn life, that he got years and years and years.

But with a blink, the other Sam is gone, it’s just his goofy little brother again, and all Sam says, after he sighs, is, “Just...just don’t cut off your nose to spite your face, okay, man? I love you.” And then he _hugs_ Dean, hugs him and lets him go too quickly for Dean to get over the shock, let alone even think about putting down his beer and hugging him back. Dean’s still trying to process what just happened, not to mention what he meant by that cutting off his nose to spite his face comment, as Sam is going back out front and saying his goodbyes to Cas.

The rain sounds very loud in the kitchen for a few moments. When he can move again, Dean feels a little jerky, strange, and he takes another beer from the fridge and goes out to the porch, where Cas is sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs.

“Still here, huh?” he asks, offering Cas the bottle. The words taste a little bitter in his mouth, and he can’t help hoping Cas tastes it, too, as if he’d spit in the drink after opening it.

“You told me not to leave, and Sam asked me to wait here,” Cas says flatly. He takes the bottle, and doesn’t drink.

“Yeah, well,” Dean says, and wants to say something snide and pointed, but everything he can think of just sounds weak in his head. “Good,” he adds, inanely.

Another few moments, and Cas finally says, “Dean, is there something you want me to—”

“Just—I don’t get it, okay? I don’t get it. I don’t—were you avoiding me or what? How long were you gonna wait for me to figure it out before you just said something?”

“I did say something on a few occasions. I asked you questions.”

“Oh, eat me.” This is easier, more familiar, this doesn’t require him to think too hard about what happened in the field, about why he wouldn’t just let the asshole go. “Don’t get cute, you don’t have the boyish charm to pull it off. You know what I mean.”

Cas doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then he asks, quietly, “Why am I here, Dean?” He sounds—something, tired maybe. There’s also an edge to his voice that sounds like a warning, like the start of a countdown clock. “Do you have something to say to me?”

That’s putting it lightly, except that Dean doesn’t even know where to start. It’s like his mind goes blank even as his heart is choking on all the things he wants to say; he’s got a ton to say and he can’t figure out how to cram it into word shapes. Taking a break would be the best, giving himself time to think, to write it on some damn index cards if he has to, but right, like he’s gonna risk this fucker disappearing and leaving him waiting another few decades? So all he can do is laugh a little, and even that has to force its way painfully from his throat, and there’s an awful edge to his own voice.

“I mean—there’s—” God, he sounds so stupid. He sounds so goddamn stupid. “I just want—” And really, what he wants—what he needs—is for Cas to stay until he can figure out what the fuck he wants to say. But it’s not like he can just ask that, right?

Cas is still just looking at Dean, and he sets his bottle on the arm of the chair and stands, moves a little nearer to Dean, and the sight of the bottle, sweating in the humid stormy air, still full, just sends panic sparking through Dean—he’s gonna leave again—and he finally says, in a rush, “Wait, I’m—I don’t know, I—just please, Cas, please don’t—”

“Is there something you want to say?” Cas asks, and it’s probably just wishful thinking but Dean feels like he hears something else in his voice, like it’s not quite as steady as it was, like maybe he’s hoping for something too. “Or...” he breathes—

—and then his hand closes, gently, around Dean’s wrist. He tugs at it, until Dean lets go of the railing. Dean can’t look at his face, not directly, but he can feel Cas’s gaze on him, burning. He can’t tear his gaze away from their hands, how Cas turns Dean’s hand over, so the palm is facing up, and with his thumb, traces slow, hot circles in Dean’s palm. Dean’s heart isn’t pounding, exactly, but he’s aware of it in a way that he rarely is; it feels bigger or harder or more connected to every part of him, each beat pronounced, heavy with meaning and something that feels like hunger.

Cas has moved closer still, and the thumb of one of his hands is still on Dean’s palm, makes one last circle before sliding up to his wrist, but he puts his other arm around Dean’s waist, warm and heavy as a summer night. Dean can’t bring himself to look directly at him, but he can feel himself lean towards Cas, slightly, as if pulled by the gravity of him.

“Maybe—” Cas’s voice is so soft. Dean shouldn’t be able to hear him over the sound of the rain, but he’s so close, any closer and Dean could feel his breath. Cas isn’t smiling. Dean’s looking just past him now, can’t bring himself to look at his face, because in this form, in this place, looking may not burn out Dean’s eyes, but he knows down to his bones that if he looks, something will happen, something big and terrifying and irrevocable.

“Or maybe,” Cas says again, tightening the arm around his waist, fingertips digging in, and Dean’s heard the words so many times in his head, but they’ve never sounded like this, never. “Maybe you just wanted me all to yourself for a little while.”

And then the the arm around Dean’s waist falls away, and his hand is on Dean’s shoulder, right over the spot he goddamn marked, and all the while he’s still got Dean’s hand in his and for just a moment something under Cas’s hand on his shoulder—like where the mark was, _his_ mark—feels _hot_ —

“Is that it, Dean?” Cas asks, and fuck, it should be horrific to hear this out loud, because fantasies are never as good in reality. But it’s not awful or embarrassing or a complete boner-killer, instead it’s so much better, it’s beautiful and terrifying and it’s the hottest goddamn thing that’s ever happened to Dean. And judging by the tightness in his groin, it is one thousand goddamn percent the opposite of a boner-killer. “Am I right?”

Cas’s face isn’t playful, the way Dean’s imagined it when he’s alone. There’s a little bit of a smile there, but not like this is a joke, like he’s hopeful, like this is something precious, like this is something holy. If it were anyone else in the universe Dean would assume he was making fun of him; it might be easier if he _was_ making fun of him, Dean could just kick his ass (or, okay, fine, he’s a goddamn angel, so more realistically, Dean could just get his own ass kicked) and tell him to get lost, but he’s not, he’s deathly serious. “Do you want—”

“Just for me,” Dean finishes, and he looks at Cas just in time to see Cas look away and fucking _gasp_ , a tremor running through his entire body, and that fucking does it, there’s no question now, maybe there never really was but Dean can’t think about that right now, can barely think about anything right now. He drops his beer and is dimly aware of the clunk of the bottle hitting the ground as he grabs the lapels of Cas’s coat again, shoves him up against the wall, and kisses him, hard, and Cas makes a low sound deep in his chest and parts his lips, thrusting his tongue into Dean’s mouth as his hands go to Dean’s waist, slide to his hips, a couple of fingertips dipping below the waistband of his jeans.

“Just for me, fuck, yes, you know that already,” Dean whispers, as Cas presses kisses underneath his jaw, closes his teeth, briefly, on Dean’s earlobe and sends something rocketing straight to Dean’s dick. Dean can hear the edge of desperation in his own voice but he doesn’t even care anymore. “You know that, Cas, you know—you’re just—Cas, you stay for me, please, Cas, you _stay_ —”

The noise Cas makes at that is unreal, low and unsteady, his hands digging in tight at Dean’s hips, tight enough to bruise as he cries out. He doesn’t say anything, just dips his chin once in a nod, his eyes closed.

“You stay,” Dean says again, and Cas makes another of those sounds, like what he’s feeling is just a hair away from pain, and a tremor runs through him. It’s the hottest goddamn thing Dean has ever heard. It’s the hottest goddamn thing he’s ever heard, and Cas’s eyelids fluttering as he looks at Dean, like he’s barely got the strength to keep them open, is the hottest goddamn thing he’s ever seen. Cas’s hands are on his back now, holding him close, and he just fucking lunges at Dean with his mouth, kissing him again, widening his stance so that Dean can slip a leg between his thighs. Dean closes his eyes as Cas rocks against him, desperate, and he’s barely aware of something shifting, slightly, around them, the smell of the air changing. When he finally opens his eyes again, pulls his mouth off of Cas’s just long enough to catch his breath, they’re upstairs in his bedroom. He laughs a little, shaky, kind of wants to make a joke about how desperate Cas is, but let’s be real, right now he’s in a glass house on that score.

“Yes,” Cas sighs, and he barely moves as Dean pulls the coat off of him, and the suit jacket underneath. He just grabs at Dean’s shirt and pulls him flush against him again, and fuck, fuck, Cas is actually fucking hard under his slacks, Dean can feel him, and fuck, Dean’s already panting. “Yes,” Cas says again, and kisses Dean, hard and sharp. “Dean—please, just, just say it again—”

“You stay,” he says again, and all the ferocity has gone out of Cas, all the fight. Cas just sort of drops onto the bed, like he doesn’t have the strength to stand up anymore, and he lets Dean climb on top of him, still clinging tight to Dean’s shirt.

“I’m sorry,” Dean murmurs. “Cas, I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know, and I just—”

“But you do want this?” Cas asks, pulling back a little, just a little, to look at him, and his eyes are a little glassy and he’s flushed and fuck, Dean wants so much. “You want—”

“Yes,” Dean says, and tugs at Cas’s tie, pulls it loose and tosses it aside and kisses the hollow at the base of Cas’s throat. He rolls his hips, feels Cas’s erection drag against his own through their clothes. “Yes,” he says again, as Cas lets out a hiss. “You know I do,” he says.

“I can feel it.” Cas’s voice is low and rough, half-wrecked already. “Dean, I can feel it.”

A laugh slips out of him, low and giddy, the kind of laugh that just bubbles up when things are good, for once, when things are just, quite simply, so fucking good that you can’t keep it inside. “Yeah, I bet you can feel it,” he says, as he grinds his crotch against Cas’s again.

“No,” Cas says, and he’s panting, his voice ragged, but he pauses just long enough to look at Dean and take one of Dean’s hands in his, press it to his chest. “I mean here.”

Dean can’t breathe for a moment, and then he sucks in more air than he needs, and then, since one of his hands is already on Cas’s shirt, the sensible thing to do seems to be to bring the other hand up to it, too, seize the plackets and just rip the damn thing open.

“I always wanted to do that,” he says, as buttons go flying, and Cas is the one who laughs a little this time. He skims his hands over Dean’s back again as Dean tugs his undershirt out of his waistband. Slides his fingers into Dean’s hair and then pulls Dean back up to his mouth. The kiss is sloppy, drunken, like Cas is getting wasted just on this. Fuck, maybe he is, a little.

Maybe Dean is, too, a little.

Tugging again at his undershirt, Dean mumbles, “Way too many layers, man, we gotta do something about that.”

“Isn’t that what you’re doing now?” Cas asks, as Dean moves back down his torso, drops a kiss on his stomach. He still sounds shaky, and the fact of that—that he’s having trouble keeping it together—it’s hard to emphasize enough how incredibly friggin’ hot that is.

“Yeah, now,” Dean says. “But we’re just gonna have to do this all over again next time. I mean, unless you wanna just spend the rest of eternity here, naked.”

“I wouldn’t mind that,” Cas says, dazedly, and Dean’s fingers, which have just gone for Cas’s belt, suddenly feel clumsy and slow at the thought. Another low, unselfconscious laugh escapes him as he finally gets the belt undone, gets Cas’s pants open.

And then, just for a moment, Dean hesitates—he feels weirdly shy, for half a second, not like he wants to stop but maybe a little unsteady, uncertain of his footing. Just for a heartbeat or two. But then he notices that the light is getting brighter, too bright for a moment, so that he needs to close his eyes; it’s not lightning, it reflects off the windows wrong, from the inside of the room—

It’s just a flash, but when he opens his eyes Cas is still leaning up on his elbows, just looking down at him, his eyes wide and his lips parted, only he’s a little blurry at the edges, maybe.

“Cas,” he says, lifting himself long enough to blink at the room around them, “did you see—”

“I’m sorry,” Cas rasps, closing his eyes, chin dipping to his chest. He breathes deeply, and the room seems a little more dim, suddenly, things are clear again—”I was—I didn’t mean to—”

“Holy shit.” Because seriously, holy _shit_ —”That was you?”

Cas is panting, his dick hard as fucking iron, and his eyes are a little glassy as he blinks at Dean, his eyelashes fluttering. “I’m sorry, I—holding this form can be difficult, sometimes, if I’m—I haven’t tried to do this yet, here, and sometimes, if my emotions are—”

“Oh, shit,” Dean breathes, because goddamn, the thought that Cas couldn’t fucking control himself is...hot isn’t the word. That’s beyond just regular hot. That is just incandescently hot, that’s fucking supernova-hot. And pushing it is probably a really stupid idea, because if the idea of him losing control like that is supernova-hot then this isn’t playing with fire, it’s playing with a supernova.

But also, that moment of half-hesitation is completely gone, burned to cinders in the heat. Now, Dean just really, really kinda wants to find out what else might happen.

“I’m sorry,” Cas says again, trying to push himself up to sitting, and Dean just—holy shit, what else is he supposed to do? He shoves him back down, bites the nearest bit of skin he can find, a soft stretch at Cas’s waist, and squeezes Cas’s dick, and just fucking revels in the gasp Cas gives, how it turns into a moan.

“I wasn’t complaining, Cas.” He can hardly hear the words himself, but Cas’s inhale is sharp, with a hitch at the end. His mouth curls into a smile against Cas’s skin, against his hip, and then he’s wrapping his lips around the head of Cas’s dick and sliding the hand he had wrapped around the base up and down and Cas makes this ragged, filthy sound and holy shit, there is no way Dean’s gonna stop now.

As he keeps going, as Cas’s breathing gets ragged, it’s sort of stereoscopic, like two different images that somehow make more sense as one if you can cross your eyes just right. From this angle, it’s hard to get a lot of detail, but that’s probably just as well, because trying to focus makes his head hurt a little, like when he’s seen an angel—not “an angel”, Cas, he reminds himself dimly, it was Cas, it was always Cas, and right now, in this moment, it isn’t infuriating, like it was earlier—indoors. How he knows, instinctively, that they shouldn’t fit but the space somehow accommodates them anyway.

At some point, Dean realizes vaguely, he got his jeans open; his boxers are already damp with sweat and pre-come as he rubs himself through the fabric. And then Cas cries out again, not just noise but “Dean,” this time, his hand twisting in Dean’s hair as Dean takes more of Cas into his mouth, as Cas comes, and it tastes so human, so ordinary and human, the contrast with the flickering of his true form above, around, that Dean finds himself laughing again, coughing a little because he laughed mid-swallow, and then the idea of a fucking come-induced coughing fit is the funniest fucking thing he’s ever heard of, and fuck, he’s just so goddamn _happy_ right now.

“Dean,” Cas says again, and pulls harder on Dean’s hair, and holy shit the way it stings a little is hot—pulls Dean back up, kisses him, like he’s trying to swallow Dean’s laughter, his smile, and he has to be tasting himself in Dean’s mouth—“I want—” Cas breathes. “Dean, let me—” Then he’s rolling on top of Dean, stripping Dean’s jeans off of him the rest of the way and stroking Dean through the thin fabric of his underwear. “Let me, please,” he murmurs again, as if Dean might even consider stopping him.

“Be my guest, man,” Dean gasps, as Cas yanks his underwear down and drags his hand along him, as his kisses become sharp, heat and teeth and hungry little sounds even though he’s the one who’s already come, like he’s already desperate for it again. And now, too, there are little flashbulb pops of light, not as bright or long as before, but enough that Dean has to close his eyes against them. Cas is murmuring something against Dean’s mouth, Enochian maybe, but Dean doesn’t need to understand the words to hear the tenderness in his voice, and the hunger. He feels something stir his hair, light, feather-light, more gentle brushes on his legs, again, feather-light, feathers, fuck, _feathers_ —he can almost see them, in the flashes of light, three pairs of wings stretching out from Cas’s back, and all the while Cas is still just working him, hard and fast.

“Fuck, Cas,” Dean hears himself rasp, before he’s grabbing the back of Cas’s head, holding him in the kiss, swallowing Cas’s words as Cas shoves his tongue into Dean’s mouth. And Cas is making just the sweetest little noises, so low they’re barely audible, and yeah, Cas is desperate again, but so is Dean. Fuck, so is Dean.

So that’s how it is, the first time Cas makes him come. He comes all over Cas’s hand, and Cas’s mouth is wide open against his own, and all of Cas’s wings are stretched out above them.

He wakes up at some point, who knows how long later. It’s still dark, and it’s still raining, and he’s tangled up with someone warm, and maybe, in the fraction of a second before he remembers, that should freak him out, but it doesn’t. And then he does remember, and he just feels something spread out, warm, inside his chest. Cas seems to be asleep too, curled on his side like he’s trying to make himself as small as possible. It doesn’t seem like he should need to sleep, but then, technically, Dean doesn’t need to sleep here either. Maybe it’s one of those things it’s better not to think too hard about.

Which isn’t going to be a problem after all, because just as Dean is thinking that maybe he shouldn’t think too hard about it, Cas’s eyes open, and he and Dean just look at each other, and then Dean opens his mouth, not sure what he’s going to say but wanting to say something. And Cas just keeps looking at him, and then Dean realizes that Cas is hard again, and also, Dean realizes that he’s hard again, too. So instead of saying something, he kisses Cas and then suddenly he’s flat on his back and Cas’s gaze feels like it’s gonna burn right through Dean, and they kiss once more and then Cas is moving down his body and oh, fuck, the noises he makes—the noises Cas makes, later, when Dean wakes up again and remembers, vaguely, that he’s got a few favors to try and return—he’s not sure he’s ever been so glad he’s got his own place as he is tonight.


	3. Chapter 3

When he wakes in the morning, he’s the only one in the bed, and his heart freezes, even before he wakes enough to recognize why, to know that someone is supposed to be here. And then he hears noise downstairs, from the kitchen, and he blinks at the sunlight, and he breathes a little bit easier, but he still calls, ”Cas?”

“Yes, I was in the kitchen,” he hears, right next to the bed, and Dean jerks in surprise, but even with the startle he feels something inside of him that he didn’t know was tense go loose.

“Fuck—Cas, you could’ve just said you were downstairs. I was just checking you were still around.”

“Oh. All right. Sorry. Yes, I-” and then he’s gone again, and things are rattling downstairs again, and Dean thinks, maybe, vaguely, he also hears a mumble that he assumes is the rest of that sentence. But Cas was smiling, that’s the other thing he was left with, for all that he’s still sort of dazed and dreamy. Cas was wearing some of Dean’s worn old clothes, and he was smiling.

* * *

Dean pulls on sweatpants, but nothing else. Cas was just wearing sweats and an old tee-shirt of Dean’s, and it really just doesn’t seem right, for him to not be overdressed in comparison to Dean. Thus, sweatpants. And, of course, the less he’s wearing, the easier it’ll be to get naked next time it becomes necessary, which will hopefully be soon.

Cas is putting away the dishes from yesterday when Dean comes downstairs. There aren’t many—a coffee mug from breakfast, a glass and a plate and the knife he used to spread mayo on his sandwich at lunch, all cleaned already but sitting in the dish rack to dry, waiting for him to put them away again before he went to bed. Dean was the only one who gave much of a fuck about the dishes in the bunker. Well, Mom had been okay about it, which frankly probably just explained where Dean got it from. Cas never really had to eat or drink as a habit, his brief detours into humanity barely a blink in his entire lifespan, so he never really got the hang of the rhythms around it, either, the things you had to do if you weren’t just gonna shove food into your mouth bare-handed. Sam was always just an absent-minded professor waiting for his body to get old enough to pull off the schtick. Jack wasn’t great, but he made an effort, and in his defense he had both Sam and Cas setting the example of leaving things around versus just Dean picking them up and making sure they got washed.

But now Cas is putting away the dishes from yesterday. He made bacon, and it’s fresh enough that the fat is still liquid in the frying pan, and it’s sitting on a plate waiting for Dean to take some. And he made coffee, which. Isn’t this form just meant to be for Dean’s ease of understanding? Shouldn’t he actually be the creature Dean’s been seeing around? This is just an illusion, why does he even need coffee? But really, strictly speaking, Dean probably doesn’t even need food, period, or sleep, or anything. So, sure, fine, if Dean can have coffee and bacon and sleep and beer and popcorn with Charlie, then there’s really no reason Cas can’t.

Anyway, there’s more dishes, there’s Cas’s mug as he stands on his tiptoes to put the glass in the cabinet where it goes, and there’s the pan with the fat that will be congealing in a few minutes, and there’s the plate he put the bacon on, and—

—the toaster makes its presence known, now, cheerfully offering a couple of perfectly-browned slices, and Cas pulls them out and puts them on another plate he had waiting. And for a second it’s all just so perfect it’s painful, it’s painfully perfect.

“Hey,” Dean says, leaning against the table. Cas looks up and just smiles at him, his face devastatingly, heartbreakingly open and sweet.

“Hello,” Cas says, and it’s so perfect it makes something hurt a little in Dean’s chest. “I made breakfast.”

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Dean’s heart is full-on aching right now, it’s all too good, too nice. Maybe that’s why he straightens up, clears his throat a couple of times and says, with practiced gruffness, “Wasn’t sure you’d still be around.”

He’s not picking a fight. He knows that, somehow, deep down. Takes a step closer to Cas, just to show it, maybe. There’s a smile trying to fight its way onto his face even now. But he can also hear something in his own voice, feel something, something raw in his throat—he wants to push against something, wants to make sure—

Cas freezes where he is, and Dean freezes, too, as Cas, deliberately, closes the silverware drawer and turns to study him. He wonders what Cas is seeing in his face, apart from the little tug at the corner of his mouth that’s the start of that smile.

Whatever it is he sees—whatever it is, his reaction is not at all what Dean expected, and it’s better than he ever could’ve hoped for. Cas’s eyes darken, and he stalks across the kitchen, and Dean barely has time to absorb the fact that it’s really fucking hot when he does that, all purposeful, before Cas has backed him right up against the table, his eyes boring into Dean’s. His voice is low, harsh, as he says “You told me to stay, Dean.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, his voice a little faint. “Uh, yeah.”

“You told me to stay,” he repeats, his hands on Dean’s throat, his thumbs stroking the line of Dean’s jaw, fuck, dragging against his stubble—”You told me to—”

“Yeah, I did,” he says again, and the more he says it, the more self-conscious Dean is starting to feel. “I wasn’t exactly subtle about—”

Cas’s arms go around him, one of his hands is at the small of Dean’s back and the other is at the nape of his neck. Those hands feel impossibly warm and impossibly broad, holding him against Cas, and Cas’s mouth is pressed against the hinge of his jaw, lips just shy of Dean’s ear.

”I’m not going anywhere, Dean,” Cas murmurs.

Dean’s knees seem to disappear for a second then. Thank fuck Cas is already holding onto him so tight; he keeps Dean standing, barely, or keeps him in place, at least, and slowly—it’s not really slow, but fuck, it feels like it, the way Dean feels it over every goddamn centimeter of skin—drags his mouth to Dean’s.

“I’m not going anywhere, Dean,” he repeats, barely even words, his voice is so soft.

And suddenly, even though they were already pressed up against each other, suddenly Dean’s on Cas in a way he wouldn’t even have guessed was possible a moment ago, just kissing him as hard as he can. Because something is too tight, painfully tight, in his throat, and that “punch it or fuck it” feeling is welling up inside of him again, and punching him is not actually on the table.

(Conveniently, though, Dean _is_ on the table.)

Cas’s breath hisses in, not quite a gasp, but a surprised sound, and when Dean closes his teeth on Cas’s upper lip he makes a noise that even this close Dean can barely hear, a moan from low in his throat. Dean’s hands scrabble on Cas’s arms, digging in; he doesn’t even care how desperate he is, how desperate Cas can probably tell he is.

“Fuck me, Cas,” he manages to mutter, “please, you need to—I need you to—”

And then Cas is kissing him, even harder, one hand sliding under the waistband of his sweats, fingers digging into the curve of his ass and pulling him even closer—he can feel how hard Cas is against him, and God, Cas must be able to feel him too, and then Cas’s hand is gone from his ass and Dean barely has time to miss it before it closes around Dean’s dick and Jesus fucking Christ, Dean can hardly breathe suddenly. The other hand is buried in Dean’s hair, pulling just a little as he kisses Dean, mouth wide open, lush. Cas’s thumb finds the vein along the underside of Dean’s dick, traces it all the way to the head and rubs there just a little—

“Turn around, Dean,” Cas mumbles against his mouth, and Dean gasps a little at the heat in his voice, at the way one of Cas’s hands tightens at his hip, the way he bites at the soft skin right above Dean’s collarbone.

“You’re not gonna disappear on me again when I’m not looking, are you?” The question bubbles up out of his chest, from somewhere—he doesn’t know where, exactly—and he can feel a little smile tugging at his mouth as he says it, because the idea of winding Cas up just a tiny bit more seems both very stupid and very fun.

Dean’s instincts, apparently, have not led him astray. Because Cas—he _rumbles_ , like fucking thunder, like something distant and expansive, something that’s dangerous not because it’s hostile but because it’s just so fucking _huge,_ it can’t _not_ be dangerous at that scale. It’s not quite scary, not really, because it’s Cas, and it’s them, and they both know Dean didn’t mean it, but it makes Dean’s stomach swoop, and it’s unbelievably fucking hot. Cas bites again, near his shoulder, hard, and sucks until Dean knows he’ll have a bruise. He drags his hand along Dean’s length, tight, and even with the first pre-come slicking the way slightly, there’s still just the right amount of friction. _“Turn around,”_ Cas growls again. Dean shudders and Cas squeezes his dick one more time before letting go and Dean isn’t a complete idiot, he turns the fuck around.

Cas shoves him down onto the table. Hard. Or maybe he doesn’t push hard, maybe Dean is just that fucking desperate for it. Maybe Dean is just as willing to bend as Cas is to push him.

“I’m not going anywhere, Dean,” Cas murmurs, just pressing against him for a moment, his dick hard and hot through the worn sweatpants they’re both wearing. He runs his hands up and down Dean’s back gently. Glancing back over his shoulder, Dean can see him, a little, until Cas leans close, pressing his chest to Dean’s back, and catches the shell of Dean’s ear in his teeth. Cas’s hips move, just a little, jerky, just enough that Dean can feel him, hard, and he pushes back, just a little, just enough to give Cas one more hint how much he wants it.

And Cas feels it, understands it, judging by the way his breath hitches for a moment. One of his hands goes to the small of Dean’s back and he presses his mouth, softly, against the nape of Dean’s neck, and his other hand slips under Dean’s waistband and wraps around his dick again.

The table was bare when Dean first came into the kitchen, but now, because of course, it’s heaven, now he sees something from the corner of his eye now, a small bottle, tilts his chin toward it—”Cas—” But Cas is already on it, picking up the lube. There’s a click of the cap popping open and then cool, slick slide of his fingers around Dean’s entrance and _fuck_. Fuck, and Cas is pressing his mouth to Dean’s shoulder again, his breath hot and damp and uneven.

“Tell me,” Cas whispers, sliding a finger into Dean—”tell me if I get it wrong, please, you have to—”

“No, fuck, you’re got it right,” Dean manages. “Shit, Cas, you’re doing great, just—you can do more, if you want, this is kind of a tease, and oh, yes, yeah,” and he finishes on a very anticlimactic sigh as Cas slips another finger in, leans down and kisses Dean’s shoulder blade while he’s at it.

Cas doesn’t say anything more, just leaves his mouth there, leaves his fingers _there_ , sliding in and out, his breath hot on Dean’s back, and Dean manages, after a moment, “Cas. Please, I thought you were gonna—”

And then Cas’s fingers stroke inside of him just right, and Dean is starting to fall apart, fuck, he feels like if it goes on much longer he might blur at the edges, the way Cas did last night, and “Please, Cas,” he croaks, and hears his voice catch, hears his own desperation and doesn’t even care. “Please, just please fuck me already, please.”

But even as he says it, Cas’s fingers have pulled out of him and he’s moving, grabbing the bottle of lube from the table once more and his fingers circling Dean’s hole again, briefly, newly slick, and then something that isn’t his fingers instead, and Dean sighs as Cas pushes into him. “I almost wish I’d waited longer,” Cas says, softly, as he sinks in, slow and gentle, “you were so close to prayer, do you know that? You were so close to it, you were so desperate—”

“Yes,” Dean manages, because it’s right, of course he was, of course he was, how could he not have been? “Yeah.”

“You’re so beautiful,” Cas goes on, and in the glass of the window next to the table, light flashes for a moment, and a distant part of Dean thinks that it’s nice he’s not the only one coming apart at the seams in this moment. “You’re so beautiful, always, of course, but when you pray, when I feel your soul reaching out, oh, Dean, you can’t imagine...”

_No,_ Dean thinks instinctively, _no, stop talking, please,_ because he’s not sure he can bear it, not sure he can take what Cas is saying on top of what he’s doing, even one of those would be difficult but both, fuck, both—but it doesn’t matter, he can’t say anything, all he can do is gasp a little, try to force out a couple of consonant sounds—”Cas,” he finally manages, barely, “I—Cas, please—”

He didn’t realize he was trying to move, to raise himself a little higher, until Cas’s hands leave his waist and go to his shoulders, and even as he’s sinking into Dean up to the hilt Cas is pushing him down, all the way down. Dean gets on his elbows and Cas grabs his wrists under him, gently. “No, Dean, you don’t have to. Not right now,” he murmurs, and kisses the back of Dean’s neck, leaves his mouth pressed there hot and damp. He guides Dean’s arms, pulls them out from under him so that Dean’s pressed against the table, the wood cool against his cheek, helpless, totally helpless under Cas. “Just be here, Dean.” His voice is rough, and Dean can’t do anything else, he’s not sure he could do anything else even if he wanted to, if he weren’t pinned down beneath a goddamn angel, pinned down and helpless and being fucked senseless and holy fucking shit, it turns out that being all of those things at once can, in fact, be incredible.

“You’re so beautiful, Dean. The light that comes off of you, the love—you can’t even imagine—I didn’t know at first,” he whispers. “I wasn’t sure, that’s why I wasn’t sure, I couldn’t feel it all, but Dean, I do now, I do again, and it’s so beautiful—you work so hard, you give so much of yourself to everyone else, Dean—I know how hard this is for you, to just be here—” and his voice is right next to Dean’s ear, his chest is hot against Dean’s back, and he’s still just taking his time, rocking in and out of Dean slowly, almost gently. Dean can barely breathe, let alone think, he just wants Cas to fuck him, he can’t—”I know how hard it is for you to just take, for once,” Cas says, and Dean’s breath catches.

“You can’t understand, Dean,” Cas says, and his voice is dreamy, like he’s seeing something Dean can’t, something that’s all wonder and light. “I just want to keep you here, just like this, until I can explain it—I don’t know if I ever could, but you need to understand.”

He’s fucking Dean harder now, but still slower than Dean would prefer, given his druthers. Slowly enough that Dean is just losing it, that tears just keep leaking from his eyes, because Cas is fucking him and Cas’s body is over his, holding him there, leaving him no choice but to listen as Cas says these things, these sweet, kind, beautiful things. He can’t take it, he really isn’t sure he can. He doesn’t know what might happen to him and he never thought it would be an issue, whether you could die in heaven, but now he really thinks it might be an issue after all, maybe even wants it to be an issue, because this _hurts_ —not the fucking, that’s incredible, but the things he’s saying, mercilessly kind. His dick is moving against Dean’s prostate, but deeper inside than that, his words are grinding against something that Dean had no idea was exposed and raw, digging into that part of him, digging in and twisting; brutally gentle and uncompromisingly—

“I love you, Dean, you need to know that—”

—uncompromisingly _loving_.

“I love you so much.”

And Dean can’t take it anymore. A sob, this absolutely wrecked noise, devastated, wrenches from his throat. “Cas,” he manages, softly, “Cas, please, I can’t take—you can’t—”

“I can,” he says again, like he did in that field, and he presses a kiss to the nape of Dean’s neck, wraps his arms around Dean’s waist—changes the angle slightly, and fucks into him a little faster and a lot harder. “I can, Dean. I do. You can take it. You’re going to take it, Dean. I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you...” and every time he says it he shoves into Dean again; he is brutally, viciously tender, his mouth on Dean’s back when he’s not saying it again and again and again.

“You—no.” Dean’s throat feels raw as the gasp is wrung from it. “No. Cas, you—please, please, Cas, you can’t—you can’t say—”

Cas just hushes him, gentle and sweet and irrevocably present. “Shhh, Dean. It’s okay. It’s okay. I love you. I love you so much. It’s okay, just let it be okay, you can just let it be okay,” he says, and that’s it, that’s it, fuck, Dean loses it, it’s done. Everything goes white for—for a moment, maybe, an hour, a century, who can say, who cares? Something enfolds him, a scent of light; sort of like the sight of Cas last night, in a little corner of his mind the scent of light is sort of layered over the feeling of Cas burying his dick into Dean one last time and staying there as he comes, hot, inside of Dean. The light-scent and the ferocious heat of Cas’s body on top of him, around him, inside him, not just his dick but the _light_ —that might drive Dean insane if he weren’t already fucking _emptied_ , heart and mind, reeling from Cas’s words and his own orgasm and oh, right, the way Cas has fucked him into goddamn oblivion, almost literally.

When he can think again, when he can move, Cas has pulled out and Dean’s somehow sitting up—well, less sitting up than being held up. Cas is sitting on the table now, and his arms are around Dean, loose and warm, and he’s just letting Dean rest his head against his chest, just stroking the back of his neck idly. Dean thinks, briefly, that he should probably say something, let Cas know he’s okay, that they can get back to breakfast, but this is—this is just so perfect, and Dean has the supremely dweeby thought that if they went back to the old heaven, the greatest-hits version, he’d almost be okay with that as long as this was one of the moments he got to live in forever. Hopefully with the mind-shattering sex first, but even without, this might almost be enough.

* * *

So for the rest of the day, all they do is screw and sleep and eat and screw and sometimes sit and watch TV, and if it weren’t goddamn heaven, new heaven, real heaven, Dean would think it was too good to be true. It seems to be too good to be true sometimes anyway. The next morning, Sam texts to ask if he wants to hang out later, and all of a sudden a cookout seems like the best goddamn idea ever, and Dean tells him to come over in the evening, and bring more beer.

(It’s not like he ever actually runs out of beer, but you can’t be too careful.)

Anyway, the first attempt at a shower gets a little off-track when Cas pulls back the curtain and steps in with him, kisses him and kisses him, and then stops kissing him just long enough to smile and sink to his knees. And, once again, it’s a million times better than Dean ever imagined it.

But afterward, he can’t stop thinking about it—well, obviously, but the problem is that if he keeps thinking about it he’s gonna be manning the grill with a raging hard-on. So he tries to think of very unsexy things, and reminding himself that Sam is going to be here too does a pretty good job of it, and then he just thinks of it again and thinks about how it was just like he imagined, except even better, and _that_ , thinking of it when he’s managed not to just immediately get sidetracked by horniness, shakes something loose in his mind.

“So you knew I had—that I’d thought about that?” Dean asks. “I mean, you know, the shower. Like that first time, when you said—you know. What I’d imagined.”

“Yes,” Cas says, calmly, not looking up from the table, where Dean’s put him to work cutting tomatoes, onions, and lettuce for toppings. He’s mostly dressed, except for the coat and jacket, and his sleeves are rolled up while he’s working, and Dean cannot believe the sight of the guy’s _forearms_ is so fucking hot. What is he, some old-timey perv desperate for hot ankle action?

“Huh,” Dean says, and then, before he can chicken out (or be consumed by forearm-induced horniness), he says, “so if you knew—if you could read my thoughts—then—didn’t you know I—that I would’ve wanted to see you? Or to know you were there? I mean—maybe not know that you were specifically watching me jerk off in the shower, but in general. Although that would’ve been a hell of an entrance. Right up there with the barn.”

Cas does lift his gaze now, and he smiles a little, but his voice is careful as he says, “I didn’t know, not at first. At first, I—well, I actually thought that perhaps it was part of a case, that you were simply here temporarily. I kept waiting for your presence to vanish again, for you to return to Earth. It seemed too soon.”

Dean feels the heat of shame in his chest, shame and something else, deep and heavy. He turns away so that Cas can’t see it in his eyes, looks down at the plate of ground beef without seeing it, tries to keep his voice light. “Yeah. Talk about embarrassing, huh? We beat friggin’ God and a couple weeks later some two-bit vamp takes me out. Can’t believe Bobby didn’t have a lecture ready to go when I got here.”

“I’m sorry,” Cas says, all soft solemnity, and he’s put down the knife now, stepped just a little closer, just close enough to put his hand on Dean’s back, just below his neck.

“For what?” Dean asks. “Wasn’t your fault.”

“You deserved more, Dean,” he says, and for a second, Dean’s throat goes tight. His chest hurts, something inside of it seems to pull him in on itself. He tries to breathe through it, deeply, and hates how shaky his next exhale sounds.

“Yeah, well,” he says, and lifts his shoulders in half a shrug. “I always figured that was about how it would go down.”

“And that’s why you deserved more.” Cas’s voice is so, so quiet, and when Dean doesn’t say anything to that, he finally moves his hand from Dean’s back, places it on his shoulder—again, so gently—and tugs at him. “Dean, can I—”

He knows, somehow, what Cas wants, lets Cas pull him around to face him, pull him into an embrace, and just stands there for—a few minutes? It’s hard to tell, and not just because of weird heaven time for once. He can’t quite manage to move, embrace Cas back, but Cas doesn’t seem to mind, seems perfectly content to just stay like this. When, at last, Dean’s able to lift his own arms, the movements are clumsy, sort of sluggish and stoned. But again, Cas doesn’t seem to care, just sighs a little as Dean’s arms go around his back in return.

“Thanks,” he finally manages to say, barely a word, barely a breath, but Cas hears him anyway, hums a little acknowledgment and presses a kiss to Dean’s temple. And the hell of it is, Dean actually does feel a little better; whatever it was trying to pull him down seems a little less heavy. Cas’s arms are loose enough that Dean can turn back around, go back to work, but Cas is slower to do the same. His arms stay around Dean’s waist, his breath warm on the back of Dean’s neck, for a couple of minutes, before he finally seems satisfied that Dean is more at ease. Dean hears him go back to the table, hears the crunch of the knife sliding through the lettuce, and it soothes him a little further.

After a few minutes, he clears his throat, tries again. “So is that what the questions were about? Whether it was me, and the car, and all? Why you just kept hanging around? You were trying to figure out if it was actually me?”

“Mostly,” Cas says.

“Mostly?” Dean repeats.

“Shouldn’t we be getting ready for—”

“Man, you know Sam’s gonna have the same questions eventually, and you can’t...I dunno, tenderly embrace your way out of it with him,” he says, laughing a little.

Cas sighs. “As I said, at first, I thought you would be gone again soon. I didn’t know if we would have time to say anything to each other, or if you would remember anything if we did. Then, as time went on, I thought I should let you get used to things, give you time to find your friends and family.”

“Yeah, but you _are_ —you know that, you know how important you are. To all of us. Shit, the only one who’d heard from you at all was Bobby, and him only the one time. Let alone—I mean, why couldn’t you just say something, or just knock on my door in this form, or whatever?”

Cas looks at him for a moment, as if he’s weighing things in his mind. At last, he says, reluctantly, “Even when it became clear that you were here to stay, I wasn’t entirely sure that it was you.”

That stops Dean where he’s standing. “What?”

“I was mistaken,” Cas tells him quickly.

“Okay,” Dean says, trying to keep his voice level, “but just for the sake of argument, why wouldn’t you think it was me?”

“Why would we want to argue about—”

“Can you just tell me, Cas, please?”

He sighs, and finally says, “Something seemed to be different. Missing.”

And Cas is way too calm about that—or maybe not, Dean hurries to tell himself, maybe he’s just the right amount of calm, he said he was wrong. But it’s kinda hard not to get a little nervous about it. “Missing?” he repeats.

“I was mistaken,” Cas says, again. “It’s there. I think perhaps that in my true form, with things still in flux in much of heaven, my perception may have been off. You are yourself, Dean, entirely.”

“Okay, well, what was it?” he asks. “The missing thing. Are we talking, like, part of my soul?”

“Emotion,” Cas says. “There was something—I felt it, but it seemed different, somehow, from how I was used to feeling it from you. Less—powerful. Sharp.”

“So...I wasn’t feeling something that I should’ve been. Something strong.”

“I thought not, no.” Cas is careful as he says it, deliberate, putting just a little bit of emphasis on thought. “I was mistaken.”

“Yeah, you said that. But what was it? That was missing? That you thought I wasn’t feeling?” Because he can’t really think what it could have been; he’s just been himself this whole time, just felt like himself. He hangs out with his friends and he goes for drives and he makes lunch and all that other ordinary shit. Hell, he hasn’t had anything stronger than a beer in what feels like weeks, sometimes he even takes naps. He’s been something like...well, he’s been happy.

Shit. Maybe that was the problem.

“Dean, may I ask,” Cas says, and Dean’s kind of grateful for the interruption, for the distraction, at least until he goes on, “why you didn’t simply pray to me earlier?”

He doesn’t say it like an accusation, and he just looks curious. His eyes are still soft when he looks at Dean. But the question feels like a jab, nonetheless, and something sinks inside of Dean. Because maybe that _was_ the problem, that he was happy, that there was nothing he was obsessing over, no apocalypse to carry, no innocent people to save.

Or fail to save.

“I—I don’t know,” he says. “I guess...it just sort of seemed like—I guess I figured you were busy, with everything, and...and I should’ve gotten you out,” he says in a rush, turning away from Cas once again because he can’t say it while he’s looking at him, can’t even really think it. Because that’s part of it, he knows. “I should’ve been figuring out how to get you out. We should’ve been trying, me and Jack and Sammy, all three of us, but I should’ve— _I_ should’ve—I just—but instead Jack had to clean up the whole mess for us and then I just went and got my dumb ass killed. And I guess I didn’t—I felt like such a fucking asshole. I’m sorry,” he says, and he can’t look Cas in the eye, but he at least turns his head, briefly, in Cas’s direction. And then, softer, _“Fuck,”_ because something in his throat, his chest, feels scraped raw.

“Dean,” Cas says, low, and, “No.” Gentle and decisive, final. Like that’s all there is to it, like it’s that simple. He moves around the table again, and Dean holds up a hand, waves him away, because fuck, no, here he’s trying to apologize to Cas and instead all he’s doing is making it about him. Classy.

“Cas, it’s fine,” he says.

“It clearly isn’t,” Cas says, short, catching the hand Dean’s trying to wave him back with and raising it to his mouth, kissing his knuckles. The whole gesture is quick—not rushed or furtive, just efficient, matter-of-fact, like it’s an instinct, something that just comes to Cas naturally, unconsciously. It warms something inside of Dean, and he picks up his beer with his free hand but doesn’t let go of Cas’s with the other.

“It’ll _be_ fine,” he attempts instead, and that feels less like a lie, feels downright possible. Cas seems to accept that, the lines on his brow smoothing slightly. “Also,” Dean adds, glancing down at their clasped hands, “I know foodborne illness isn’t a problem here, man, but you still might want to wait until I wash my hands before you do that.”

Cas just smiles again, squeezes Dean’s hand once more before letting it go. “When you recognized me—how did you recognize me?” he asks.

“Did you really think I wouldn’t eventually?” Dean picks up his bottle again, takes another drink before continuing. “I mean, I know I’m not the sharpest bulb in the crayon box, Cas, but you had to figure that even I’d eventually notice one particular angel kept looming over me every time I turned around.”

“An angel, yes, but not necessarily the same angel each time. Humans can’t generally tell us apart. Not so quickly, not in our true forms.”

“Yeah, well.” Dean shrugs, picks at the label on the bottle. “I dunno, man. I should’ve figured it out sooner. I’m—I’m sorry about that.”

“Why?” Cas tilts his head, and even now, after days with no one but each other, the movement still makes something feel warm and achy inside of Dean’s chest, the familiarity of it.

“What do you mean, why? The least I could do at this point is pick you out of a damn lineup.”

He just smiles at Dean, and there’s something in it, something so sweet and tender that it’s like a jab in Dean’s gut. But Cas doesn’t say anything about it, just goes back over to the vegetables and continues, “As I said, even here, when you’re no longer physically capable of having your eyes burned out, humans generally can’t make much of our true forms, or retain enough specifics to tell us apart. That you were able to identify me as an individual-that you were able to pick me out of a lineup, even if you didn’t know it was me—it says a great deal of you.”

“Maybe,” Dean says, because even though other people have said it, even though Cas has said it, it’s hard to quite believe it, that it could be that difficult, that unusual. But if it is. If it is.

He’s not sure what that might mean, and he’s not even sure he’s ready to think about what that might mean just yet—the idea that maybe, somehow, he still knew Cas. One thing at a time, and right now there’s cookout stuff to do. Dean tries to will away the lingering sense of something tight through his chest.

Clearly, he isn’t quick enough about it, though, because the concern in Cas’s voice is obvious as he says, “Dean?”

Playing dumb seems like the best way to buy himself a little bit of time to calm whatever it is in him, and he opens the fridge, pretends to be looking for something. “Yeah?” he asks, and thinks he sounds just about normal. It’s hard to be sure, though, when he can feel Cas watching him, and when he finally thinks he’s cool, straightens and closes the fridge again, he sees that Cas is frowning at him, his eyes narrow.

Cas’s voice is low and even when he says, “Come here, Dean.” But he’s the one who moves first, puts down the onion he’s been slicing and begins to move around the table to Dean even as he says it, and goddamn if Dean doesn’t instantly feel that—the fact that he doesn’t wait, maybe can’t wait—low in his belly.

“Ooh, bossy,” he says, and goes, meeting Cas halfway. “That takes me back.”

Cas smiles a little at that, takes Dean’s face in his hands again, and Dean is honestly starting to get nervous about how much he likes it when Cas does that. (Which seems a little weird, given how acquainted they’ve become with one another’s genitals over the past couple of days, but this—this is intimate in a different way.) “I didn’t mean to worry you, Dean. I’m sorry. But you asked, and it seemed best to simply tell you the truth.”

“It’s really fine, though? You’re sure about that?” Dean asks, because something in him still feels unsettled. To be fair, though, a lot of him feels unsettled the past few days. Mostly it’s in a good way, sort of nervous and jazzed, like the slow climb up an incline on a roller coaster. “I’m me? Nothing missing?”

Cas doesn’t just say something to shut him up. He just holds his gaze for a few moments, then closes his eyes for a few moments more, like he’s listening for something, breathes deeply and opens his eyes and barely tips his head in a nod. “Yes,” he says. And the fact that he took the time to consider it, didn’t just rush to reassure him, that actually helps settle Dean. “I’m sure of it. I was simply mistaken, initially. You have my word.”

“Okay,” Dean says, and then, again, softly, “okay,” and then he’s kissing Cas, and for a few moments, it’s almost perfect, except—except. Except he can’t quite forget it, can’t forget what it was—that he was happy, that he was okay. Because. Because fuck. Fuck, he shouldn’t have been. He fucking _shouldn’t_ have been, and—“I’m sorry,” he says, pulling away again. “Cas, I should’ve—”

“No, Dean.” He’s still hanging onto Dean’s face, even though Dean has pulled his mouth off of Cas’s, Cas’s hands are still on his cheeks, his fingertips in Dean’s hair, his thumbs on Dean’s jaw, and his eyes are half-closed, his gaze on Dean’s mouth.

If it was anyone else Dean would think he wasn’t really listening.

“Yes, Cas, will you just—” He should take the out Cas is offering him. He knows he should. But he knows that if he does take it, it’ll just sit there, this knowledge that what made Cas uncertain was that he—well. Let’s be honest, it’s that Cas thought he didn’t give a shit, isn’t it? That’s what it is. And if he takes the out, and it just sits there, then he’ll just keep thinking about it, thinking about how he just took the out, like a coward, and frankly he’s not even sure Cas realizes he’s offering Dean an out, because he’s just that fucking _good_. “Please, Cas, I—you keep acting like it’s okay, but—do you think—Cas, look, we both know I don’t deserve—”

“Dean,” he interrupts, and his voice is strange, a little uneven, as he slowly drags his eyes up to stare into Dean’s, “please don’t ask me to forgive you.”

Dean’s breath escapes all at once, like he’s been punched in the solar plexus. He can almost feel the actual blow. Because he deserves that, he knows he does. He knew the whole time, deep down. But to hear it, even now, after they fucking found each other, after everything—to hear it out loud is something different, makes it real. He can feel tears rolling down his cheeks, sudden and silent, and the fact that Cas won’t look away from him, won’t let him look away, makes this so much worse.

“Yeah,” he finally manages, because Cas seems to be waiting for him to say something. “No. I get it. Okay.”

But Cas just looks miserable, almost as miserable as Dean feels. “Dean, I’ll say the words if you need to hear them, but your happiness wasn’t a sin. It doesn’t require atonement, and it certainly doesn’t require my forgiveness.”

Fuck. The shock pulls Dean’s gaze back up to Cas’s eyes. They’re glittering, and Dean stares at him, uncomprehending.

“What?” he asks. “No, Cas, don’t—you don’t have to—”

“I’m _not_ , Dean.” His voice is low, urgent, almost angry. “I’m not saying what I think you want to hear. _There is nothing to forgive,_ ” he says, and his thumbs swipe across Dean’s cheeks, damp. “And the idea of you treating your happiness as one more weapon to turn on yourself...Dean, I told myself that you were happy, that it should be enough, because I was afraid to face you. The last time we’d seen each other, I said something reckless because I was about to die, and I thought I’d never see you again, so when I did see you again—I wasn’t prepared. I tried to have it both ways. I should be asking for _your_ forgiveness.”

“What the fuck?” Dean asks, and laughs a little, because he’s completely lost at this point. “Cas, no, you shouldn’t, I—” And okay, honestly, he’s not sure what they’re even arguing about, except that apparently they both feel like shit, but Cas, at least, feels like shit for completely stupid reasons, like, such stupid reasons that he has to wonder if the guy’s all there, even. “What you said earlier, about—that goes both ways, okay? There isn’t anything you need to be sorry for.”

“Dean—”

“No, seriously, just shut up and let me—” And then he kisses Cas again, and as he’s doing it Dean has, truly, the stupidest thought, but whatever, fine, apparently they’re doing that now, so. “What have I always said, man?” he breathes against Cas’s parted lips. “Last night on Earth. Best excuse ever. Works every time.”

Cas pulls back just long enough to give him the most irritated look Dean’s seen on his face in maybe ever, and maybe it's just that he's still a little shaky inside, that his eyes still feel like they could start leaking again at any second, but the sight of it just makes Dean stupidly, perversely happy. Because it just feels so _normal_. Like maybe this is how it could be. Like they could actually fit into each other’s lives (or afterlives, whatever), and things could just be like this. Forever.

Plus, the idea of an ageless celestial being feeling something as petty as irritation with Dean’s bullshit is, and always has been, extremely funny.

“C’mere,” he says, tugging on Cas’s tie and pulling him close again, because he’s pretty sure he can see a little bit of a smile on Cas’s face, too, and that’s gotta just be embarrassing for the guy. Better if Dean keeps his mouth busy until he can get that under control.

So Cas kisses him back, and Cas’s arms go around him, one hand just between his shoulder blades and the other at the small of his back. Cas’s lips part again and when Dean’s tongue slips between them he sighs, and the hand low on Dean’s back clenches into a fist, tugging his shirt out of the waistband of his jeans, and—

—and that’s when Sam clears his throat from the doorway.


	4. Chapter 4

Okay, so Sam showed up a little early—that’s not really his fault, Dean realizes, intellectually, especially what with time doing its own weird thing here, but come on, the guy can’t knock?—and walked in on them mid-makeout. Even if half of Dean’s mind weren’t in his dick, he supposes it wouldn’t exactly be easy to think up a platonic reason for why his tongue is in Cas’s mouth and Cas’s hands are fisted in his shirt, so they all just kind of stare at each other for a few moments, mouths wide open, before Cas clears his throat, lets go of Dean’s shirt, and says “Sam.”

“Uh,” Sam says, and then, “hey, guys.”

So they all just stare at each other for a little longer after that, and then, because no one else is saying anything, Dean figures it’s just gonna be on him, so he manfully steps up, says “I should go fire up the grill,” grabs the burgers and the lighter from the counter, and is out the door as quickly as he can possibly go.

But of course his brother can’t just leave it at that. When the lighter fluid’s burned off and the charcoal’s just about right to pop the burgers on, Sam sidles up to him and hands him a beer, and even though Dean’s avoiding looking directly at the giant little asshole, he can see from the corner of his eye that Sam is smiling.

“Thanks,” Dean says.

Sam even lets him take a sip first before he pounces. “So how long has this been going on?”

“What, the burgers? Just put them on a few minutes ago,” Dean says cheerfully, and he can practically _hear_ his brother rolling his eyes.

“I wouldn’t dignify that with a response, except I know you’re not gonna give me a real answer if I don’t make you. _You and Cas,_ Dean. I mean, I’m assuming it’s mostly since you dragged him back here the other night, but really, looking back—”

Despite his best efforts to pretend this conversation isn’t happening, Dean’s stomach drops at that. “Dragged him?” he repeats. “Jesus, what am I, holding the guy hostage? I didn’t drag him anywhere.” He tries to beat down a surge of panic over the fact that that’s...kind of exactly what he did. Cas was into it, though, right? He definitely seemed to be into it. And he could’ve left, if he wasn’t, made up some angel business that he had to take care of. “Also, looking back at what?”

Sam just blathers on, blissfully oblivious to the mini-crisis Dean just had. “Look, man, I really don’t care, if that’s what you’re worried about. To be honest, it’s not that much of a shock. I mean, I wasn’t really expecting to walk in on you two with your tongues halfway down each other’s throats—”

“I’d say it was more that my tongue was halfway down _his_ throat, really.” Dean feels the need to point out, and Sam’s face does this hilarious scrunch-up thing. “Cas was being coy,” Dean adds, helpfully. “He likes to pretend he’s shy,” he continues, because Sam looks like he might be on the verge of walking away, “but let me tell you, the virgin angel act is cover for—”

“But. Like. I. Said. Looking. Back,” Sam continues, loudly and very carefully enunciated, apparently having recognized Dean’s attempt at a deflection for what it was, goddammit, “you two have always been kind of weird about each other.”

“Weird about each other? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Sam squints at him, as if this is the most obvious thing in the world and he thinks Dean might just be doing a bit where he pretends to be an idiot. “I don’t know, like, intense, I guess? I mean, at first, you two had that whole he-saved-you-from-hell thing going on, but he was also just barely our ally and we didn’t even really trust him, so there was a lot of tension—like, a _lot_ of tension—but later, there was...” Sam pauses, apparently trying to think of more examples, and finally just makes a vague gesture with the hand not holding his beer, “well, you know, there was _everything_ , and—”

“Everything? Are you telling me—what are you telling me? You know what,” Dean says, before Sam can answer that, “what do you even want from me here? It’s happening. That’s all you need to know.”

Sam sighs, says, patiently, “Dean—”

“Unless you want more details,” Dean says. “You want more details? So, yesterday morning, we’re about to have breakfast, but first, you know that table in the kitchen? Well, Cas just bends me right over it and—”

“ _God,_ Dean, fine!” Sam snaps, and this time, he actually does walk away.

“It was mind-blowing!” Dean calls after him, and feels pretty pleased with himself as he flips the burgers. Hey, Sam wanted to know more. And it's not like he's lying. It _was_ mind-blowing.

Once Sam gets off his back, it’s actually pretty nice, standing out here. Through the smoke, he can see Sam and Cas sitting at the wooden table; they’re distorted by the waves of heat off the fire, but not enough for him to miss the way Cas keeps glancing over at him now and then, or smiling when he does it. Maybe Dean smiles too. Maybe the fact that he can see Sam looking back and forth between the two of them now and then and _also_ smiling doesn’t even bother him that much, even though he feels like he should still let Sam’s burgers get overdone on principle.

Cas just sits down next to him, casually touches Dean’s shoulder as he does, and Dean looks over and ends up catching his eye and they just gaze at each other for a second and Cas has that goofy little smile of his on his face, and when they go back to the food, even Sam’s delighted expression can’t ruin it for Dean. Because yes, fine, Dean likes just being around him, likes just being able to do this, to touch—not even in a sex way (although that’s obviously awesome too), just—just be touching him, thoughtlessly, to not have to catch himself or think about it or realize it would be weird if he did it too long.

The idea that he _can_ now, that he can just _look_ at Cas, just touch him—it’s still barely beginning to sink in, and when he remembers what Sam said earlier, about them always being intense about each other, something starts to slot into place. Because maybe, maybe he’s been doing that for a while—looking, touching without thinking, and it’s only now, when habit tells him he’s making it weird, he’s staring too long or touching too much, that he’s starting to realize he doesn’t have to break the habit. That he can even make it more of a habit.

“So, Cas,” Sam says, after they’re all settled, “can I ask—why did it take you so long to show up?”

Dean can’t resist saying, “Told you.”

Cas’s only response is to sigh.

“What?” Sam asks.

“I asked him earlier, and he tried to blow me off—”

“Dean, I was not trying to—”

“—so I told him you were gonna ask anyway, so he might as well just tell me. Also, he didn’t just ‘show up’,” Dean feels the need to point out. “I had to threaten to come up and make a scene at the office.”

No one says anything for a few seconds after that, and as they all listen uncomfortably to the sound of the breeze through the trees, Sam looks like he might be having some regrets. Although as usual, he doesn’t appear to have nearly as many as he should.

Finally, Cas says, “As I told Dean when he asked me earlier, there were a few different reasons. First I thought it might be temporary, perhaps part of a case, and then I wasn’t entirely certain it was him. Then I thought—the last time we had seen each other,” he adds, and Dean feels a spike of cold shoot through him, because he’s not sure there are words for how little he wants to get into that in front of Sam, but mercifully, Cas just says, “I wasn’t sure he wanted to discuss something I had said. I wasn’t sure _I_ was ready to discuss it, either; I had never expected to see him again.”

Curiosity is as subtle as a billboard on Sam’s face, but for once in his life, Dean’s little brother takes pity on him. Instead, he says, “What did you mean about not being sure it was him?”

“He said there was something wrong with me,” Dean says, shortly. “Look, he’s said he was wrong, it was just his angel radar on the fritz or something, so we don’t even need to worry about it. Can we all just eat our burgers?”

“Dean, if he was wrong, then it’s not a big deal, right? I’m just curious. What, exactly, seemed off?”

“Emotion,” Cas says. “In my true form, when I first visited Dean—it seemed like there were emotions missing. I thought something might be wrong, or that perhaps it wasn’t actually him.”

And even though he’s already said that he was wrong, even though he gave his goddamn _word_ and that should be enough, even though that _was_ enough just a little while ago, it makes something twist inside of Dean. Not fear, exactly, but not far off, either.

Sam frowns. “So—huh. So you weren’t able to—”

“To sense some of what I had before he died. But then,” he adds, and Dean can feel him looking at him, now, and Cas even touches him, just a little, puts a hand at the small of his back for just a moment, nudges Dean’s knee with his own under the table. “I did again. I do, again. I was mistaken, that’s all.” His voice drops as he says it, and Dean knows the reassurance is just meant for him, and it makes that thing inside of him twist even more, but he tries to just smile.

His brother, of course, has to make what might’ve been a perfectly pleasant moment extremely irritating, first by just friggin’ _beaming_ at them like they’re the cutest thing he’s ever seen, and then by adding, “That’s really interesting, though, that even in your true form, you’d have those kinds of limits, that you could make a mistake like that. I mean, no offense, Cas, it’s just—you’re all so—you’re a lot, you angels. Not to mention,” he adds, with a smirk at Dean, “hearing you talk about Dean’s emotions and him just sitting there and letting you imply that he has them is pretty wild. So what was it that you weren’t sensing, specifically? Like, the emotions?”

“Sam, I’m not sure—”

“Hey, don’t stop on my account,” Dean says, because he’s not sure he wants to hear this—not sure he wants to hear how, he assumes, Cas didn’t recognize him because he wasn’t just pissed off, or moping about something, or just nothing inside, whatever it is that’s missing now, that makes it so he doesn’t need to drink himself to sleep or find a monster to punch. But they may as well just rip the band-aid off already, just get it out there that Cas didn’t recognize Dean when he wasn’t a pathetic fucking asshole.

Cas frowns at him, seems genuinely confused; his lips part slightly and Dean thinks he can see the shape of his name on Cas’s mouth and he takes a drink and tries to stare at a spot somewhere behind Sam. Cas makes a little sound—not vocalized, but not quite a sigh; shorter, impatient.

“Uh,” Sam says, “we can hold off on—”

Dean just shakes his head and makes an _after you_ gesture to Cas, whose frown deepens, but who finally, as Dean’s taking another drink, says, flatly, “Love.”

So Dean inhales a little of his beer and goes into a coughing fit, can’t even interrupt Cas as he continues, “Before, I could feel it much more strongly. I could still sense it here, at first, but it seemed—different, somehow. Muted, I suppose. Or—diffuse.”

“Wait, what the—” Dean tries to gasp out, but Sam’s face is like it’s Christmas morning, and he doesn’t seem the least bit concerned that Dean is aspirating, the little shit.

Cas, at least, puts a hand on his back, briefly, so the coughing stops, but even if Dean had something to say beyond _what the fuck_ he doesn’t get a chance. “Love?” Sam repeats. “The love was different. The love you were used to sensing from him. From _Dean_.” So, since Sam won’t let him get a word in edgewise, not that, again, he really has anything besides _no, seriously, what the fuck,_ Dean stares intently at his burger and tries to will himself into an out-of-body experience so he doesn’t have to try and process what he’s hearing, because _what the actual fuck is Cas fucking talking about?_

“Yes,” Cas answers. Dean can feel them both just _looking_ at him.

Fine. Okay. He’ll bite. “I thought you said—” he starts, staring back at Cas. “I thought it was...wait.” Because he realizes, now, that they didn’t actually establish what it was. He got distracted feeling shitty about himself, and Cas made him feel less shitty, and then they were making out, and then Sam showed up, and Cas forgot (or maybe “forgot”?) to actually answer his question.

“As I said,” Cas says, “it’s hard to explain. At first, I thought it was simply—what we discussed earlier.”

“The lack of unhappiness, you mean,” Dean says, because fuck it, might as well just do the full autopsy right in front of Sam.

The sound Sam makes is sort of strangled; a laugh, but not a happy one, exactly. He mutters something that sounds a hell of a lot like, “God, of _course_ ,” before adding, more loudly, “you weren’t sure it was him because he wasn’t miserable?”

“Yeah,” Dean snaps. “Keep up, Sammy.”

“No,” Cas says.

“No?” Dean repeats. “But you—”

“I thought that was it, yes,” Cas says. “At first. And that was—I think that was a part of it. But it wasn’t mere unhappiness that was missing. It was—”

“Love,” Sam supplies.

“Yes,” Cas confirms, a little slowly.

Dean’s face feels hot. If he’s fucking blushing, so help him, he’s gonna find his way back to Earth, find a ruined lighthouse somewhere, and just spend the rest of goddamn eternity haunting it in peace. Jack can tweak the ghost thing so he never goes crazy and violent and vengeful, right? Like, as a favor. Just him, chilling in a lighthouse for the rest of time, that could be okay.

“So you weren’t sure if it was him...because you weren’t feeling the amount of love you could usually sense from him.”

“No.” Cas is certain of it, Dean can hear it in his voice. “I could feel it. It wasn’t a question of quantity, but of quality. It was different. Seemed different. It wasn’t as... _focused_ might be an appropriate word. And there used to be an edge to it. Something sharper. I think it may have been—” He breaks off, looks at Dean, and his face is a mystery, a mess of things, and Dean tries desperately to imagine what he might have been about to say, what could have been so bad that Cas isn’t even willing to say it. 

“Love,” Sam repeats again and still looks torn between laughter and something way more earnest than Dean thinks he can handle right now. “ _Love._ You used to feel that from _Dean_.”

Cas sighs. “Sam, perhaps Dean and I ought to—”

“No,” Dean says. “No, I think maybe we should just get it all out here.” Because something inside of him feels too tight, and he’s not sure he can wait until Sam fucks off to deal with it, not sure it won’t snap before then.

“You said that was just at first, though. So do you feel it now?” Sam’s voice sounds a little thick, and that amused-sad expression is still on his face, but even more so now.

“Yes,” Cas says, as Sam, somehow oblivious to the fact that Dean is rapidly approaching some kind of crisis, reaches for another burger. “The love, yes. The edge to it—no. Not anymore, not since—”

“You’ve had enough,” Dean snaps, slapping Sam’s hand, more because he just needs something to do, some way to let out some of this tension coiling still tighter inside of him. “You know what, I think you’ve both had enough.” He grabs the paper plate the burgers are all piled on and hauls it over to himself, grabs the condiments, grabs all he can and piles it up like some kind of cookout dragon protecting his treasure hoard, and meanwhile he very studiously avoids making eye contact with either of them at all costs.

So Sam, with barely a glance in his direction, grabs Dean's burger instead. “Since when?” he asks, picking up where Cas left off. “Like, what happened?”

“I’m not certain what happened.” Cas seems reluctant, keeps glancing at Dean, who only sees him from the corner of his eye because he’s staring down at his cookout dragon hoard intently, trying to figure out why this feels so much more high-stakes than it should, why he feels so much more tense. Because, fine, Sam knowing some of this, it’s a little embarrassing, but it’s not embarrassment he feels. It’s like he’s on the edge of something, like he’s so fucking close to understanding it, and he’s not sure he’ll be able to handle it in the middle of this when he finally figures it out. “But it was around the time that I first appeared to Dean in this form. Before that—it was the edge I felt first. The sharpness. It built, gradually, and then it just...” He seems lost for words again. “Disappeared. There was only the love left.”

“What was it?” Dean asks, finally looking up again, looking at Cas. “The other thing.”

And Cas is staring back at him, the weirdest little twist to his mouth, like a smile, a little, but not quite. The truth is, Dean knows what he means, knows there’s something—he just didn’t know its name, didn’t know what it was. And he wants to, now. Wants Cas to say it out loud, to put a name to it.

“Wait—” And he’s not sure whether Sam’s actually having trouble finding words or just having trouble not laughing. Maybe both. But it’s hard to tell; he sounds distant, hard to hear over the pounding in Dean’s ears. “Uh. So, that love. You started feeling it again...like, around the time he figured out that you were you?”

And that might have been enough to stop Dean’s heart, but he still barely hears his brother, and Cas doesn’t even glance at Sam now, just keeps staring at Dean with that strange expression on his face, melancholy and sad but also smiling, a little.

“What was it?” he asks again, can hardly hear his own voice.

“Yeah, okay, maybe I should—” he hears Sam say.

Sam still sounds sort of distant. But then all the noise in Dean’s head goes silent as Cas hesitates. Finally, helplessly, he says, “Longing.”

“Oh, shit,” he hears Sam breathe.

Dean realizes that his mouth is open, but he doesn’t have any idea what he meant to say.

“It was building,” Cas says softly. “Gradually. Until just recently. I wasn’t used to it, because before, it always went along with the love.”

“The love,” Sam repeats again, and when Dean finally manages to tear his gaze away from Cas’s, he sees that Sam has the weirdest expression on his face, a sort of disbelieving half-smile and sad eyes.

“I—” Dean begins, and covers his mouth with his hand, and then, finally, a little stiffly, he gets up and walks away from the table. “Guys, I gotta—”

“Dean,” both of them say behind him, and Dean waves them off irritably as he stalks across the yard.

“No, no, you two chat, just keep up the gossip,” he calls, barely able to get the words out around something heavy in his chest. “I’m just gonna go for a walk.”

“Dean,” Sam calls, following behind him, with that tone of his voice that suggests they’re going to talk about feelings, and it’s a real shame they’re already dead because Dean would very much like to lie down in front of the car and ask someone to floor it.

Suicide not being possible, he instead says, almost cheerfully, “Nope, we’re not doing this.”

“Come on, Dean, you can’t just walk away from this.”

“Oh, you think? Watch me,” he says, over his shoulder, stepping onto the trail down to the lake and looking for a couple good rocks to chuck into it as he goes.

That is, apparently, not a clear enough message, because he hears Sam clomping along the trail behind him. “Dean,” he says, as he catches up, “the reason he couldn’t recognize you when you first got here is because he’s used to sensing all this love and—and _longing_ —” He laughs a little as he says it, like he can’t quite believe he’s saying it—“pouring off of you, and he didn’t feel it at first, _until you recognized him_. And now he’s feeling the love again, but not the longing. _Ever since you recognized him._ ”

“I get it, Sam,” he snaps.

“Do you, though?” he asks. “Because what it sure sounds like to me is that what he thought was just general love for the universe—which you and I both know is not really a Dean Winchester thing—not to mention friggin’ _longing_ —was actually something a little more precisely targeted. The kind of thing he might feel coming off of someone who was, say, in lo—”

“Sam, would you just _fuck off_?”

And suddenly he’s someplace else, a beach—soft sand, water glittering as the sun drops down toward the dunes behind him, the works. And, most importantly, no one—especially no Sam—in sight.

* * *

Dean has just long enough to finish his beer, and feel his heart start to go back to normal, so that he’s not feeling his racing pulse pounding through his entire body. Then, from behind him, Sam says “Glad to see a few decades in heaven haven’t actually matured you or anything. Never mind Cas, I might not have recognized you, either.”

“Oh, screw you,” Dean says. “I’m not fucking talking about this with you.”

“Yeah, which would be fine, except you’re clearly also not talking about it with anyone else, either. Certainly not Cas, although from what a couple of things he said after you flounced off—not to mention what I saw earlier—that’s not stopping you doing other things with him.”

“Yeah, well, there you go. I haven’t learned to be more mature, and apparently Cas hasn’t learned to tell when he should just keep his mouth shut,” Dean says, and he can feel his face flaring red and no, of course he’s not actually embarrassed about his brother knowing he and Cas are screwing. Of course that’s not the real problem, not what he actually wants to avoid talking about. But it’s a hell of a lot easier than what Sam does want to talk about. So he decides to lean into it, and adds, “Although while we’re on the subject of Cas’s mouth, he’s plenty good at using it for other stuff, just FYI.” He punctuates it with a leer, just in case that was too subtle. (He is fairly certain it was not too subtle.)

Sam gets a look on his face like he’s bitten into a lemon, which is friggin’ hilarious. “Good God, Dean. A, a little decorum, maybe? That’s still an angel you’re talking about. B, again with the maturity. C, nice try, but we’re not done talking about this. However, having said that, D, I’m your brother, I neither need nor want to know the graphic details.”

“Oh, what?” Dean asks, snickering. “You’re gonna go all homophobic now? Widdle Sammy thinks it’s gwoss?”

“Okay, Dean,” Sam says, rolling his eyes. “Yes. Fine. I’m the homophobic one, says the guy who’s been performing some weird overcompensating hypermasculinity since pretty much the moment he hit puberty.”

Dean chooses to ignore that. “It’s a very beautiful thing, Sam. You see,” he continues, “when two men love each other very much—”

And then Sam bursts out laughing. “Jesus, Dean.”

“Sammy, that right there is an indicator of your fundamental immaturity. Giggling like a twelve-year-old at the mere suggestion of me and Cas touching each other’s—”

“What’s funny,” Sam interrupts, giving him this smug look, like he’s got just enough Vulcan in him to be all snotty and superior (this is obviously in addition to having just enough Klingon in him to give him a truly tragic forehead), “and what’s really, _really_ sad, is that it took you dicking around trying to make me uncomfortable to just freaking admit that you love him.”

“Wait, I—”

Sam just smirks at him.

“You know, Sam, that lawyer shit isn’t—”

Sam just smirks at him a little more.

“Goddammit,” Dean mutters, and swipes Sam’s beer out of his hand before dropping down to sit on the sand.

“By the way,” Sam adds, sinking down to sit next to him, “strictly speaking, if I were to get weird about you having a thing with Cas, I think it’d really be biphobia, not homophobia.”

“Oh, thank you, Captain Vocabulary. Good to know. Now shut up and let me drink.”

“Right, yeah, of course,” Sam says. “I mean, just talking about feelings in the first place is bad enough, but now that we’ve got the L-word in the mix? I can’t believe you’re still conscious. Should I get a paper bag for you to breathe into? Splash some cold water on your face? Maybe you should put your head between your legs.”

Dean takes another sip of beer and tries to ignore how hot his face feels, then says, calmly, “You know, funny you should mention that, because just last night I had my head between Cas’s legs and—”

“God, Dean, please stop.” Sam takes his beer back, but he’s laughing as he says it, and somehow, weirdly, Dean does feel a little less shitty about everything now.

After a few moments, during which the blue of the sky has changed, gone a little more purple before them, darker off at the horizon, Sam finally says, quietly, “Cas mentioned that he said something, at the end. The thing he wasn’t sure either of you was ready to talk about. Dean, did he—”

“Yeah,” Dean confirms.

Sam doesn’t say anything, thankfully, just makes a soft noise like things are starting to fall into place. The air is getting cooler, and the blue-green of the water has shifted as the sun’s gone lower. The ocean seems darker, bigger, deeper.

“What do you think’s wrong with me?” Dean finally asks, just loud enough for Sam to hear him over the waves and the wind in the trees behind them.

It’s a real softball of a question, but Sam takes pity on him and doesn’t make any of the obvious jokes, just sighs and says, “At the end of the day, nothing special, Dean. Feelings can be big, and sharing them with someone else can make you vulnerable, and vulnerability isn’t really something anyone we know has ever been big on.”

“Yeah, well, you do it plenty. Don’t say it’s because you lived longer, because it’s not, you always did.”

“It just takes practice, Dean. It’s like anything else. I dunno, maybe your problem is just that even with all the insane stuff we saw and dealt with and did, you somehow decided that admitting to having a feeling that wasn’t angry or horny was the one thing it was too scary to face.”

Dean really wants to find something cute to say in response to that, and the fact that he can’t is unsettling.

“Like I said,” Sam says, after a moment, with a quick pat on his back, “it just takes practice. And you’ve got plenty of time for that now.” He stands, and offers Dean his hand.

“Yeah,” Dean says, and takes it, lets his brother help him up. “Yeah. C’mon, we should get—”

_—back,_ he’s going to say, but when he turns, Cas is standing there, a few dozen yards off, just watching them. He looks uncertain. Not lost, exactly, but not exactly _not_ lost, either.

“Hey, man,” Sam calls, lifting his arm in a wave, and then he gives Dean another pat on the back. “Why don’t I just go clean up while you guys...” he makes a weird, vague gesture with one of his arms, sort of tilts his head a little.

“Make passionate gay love?” Dean offers, and Sam sighs, gives him a perfunctory middle finger before he heads off down the beach in the opposite direction from Cas. When Dean looks over his shoulder, there’s no trace of Sam, so he’s got nothing else to watch but Cas, picking his way carefully over the sand toward him. He doesn’t look angry or anything, at least, just—he just looks like Cas. Which seems like it could be a good sign.

He’s so caught up just _looking_ at Cas that it takes him a few minutes to realize that maybe he could try to meet the guy halfway. But the sand is difficult under his feet, uneven, and it’s really more like meeting the guy a quarter of the way. Maybe a third. “Hey,” he says, when only a few feet separate them.

“Are you all right?” Cas asks. There’s no judgment in it, just concern, just those couple of lines between his eyebrows that Dean, suddenly, just wants to smooth out.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. I’m sorry. That was—damn, that was some prime diva shit right there, huh?”

“Yes, a little,” Cas agrees. He lifts his hand, reaches out—then drops it, and Dean’s heart seems to drop with it. “Dean—I’m sorry to have upset you.”

“No, you—”

“This has been a lot. Perhaps we should just—”

“Whoa, no, fuck no,” he says, because he knows the _maybe we’re moving too fast_ talk when he hears it. “No, Cas, stop. I’m sorry. Look, it wasn’t you, OK? I just—I needed to think, and I should’ve just said so, I get that, but that doesn’t mean—”

“I was going to say,” Cas says, gently, “perhaps we should go back to your house.”

“Oh.” Dean feels a little stupid, but Cas has always sort of made him feel that way—not intentionally, just by the very fact of him, of his existence, let alone his apparent desire to exist in proximity to Dean Winchester, of all the goddamn people in the universe—so that doesn’t bother him as much, especially not when the relief is so much stronger. “I mean, if you want. This is pretty nice, though, right?”

“Yes,” Cas agrees. At his side, his hand moves again, haltingly, more a twitch than even reaching for Dean this time. So Dean does it for him, grabs it before he can rethink it again.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, softer this time.

Cas just leans closer, touches Dean’s cheek with the hand that isn’t holding Dean’s. He’s gazing down at their joined hands, and there’s a little smile on his face, and he says, softly, “It’s all right, Dean. But thank you for saying it.”

And they just stand like that, for a few minutes, and Dean is...okay with that. He likes it. He likes having Cas’s hand on his face and Cas’s other hand in his—likes that so much that he brings his other hand up to put on top of it, so that Cas’s hand is snug between both of his. It’s the corniest shit ever, and he makes a mental note to come up with the filthiest, most depraved sex story he possibly can and have it ready to go if Sam tries to ask what happened later. But right now, he likes it a lot.

* * *

At some point, just as he’s thinking he’d like to sit down, the air changes around them a little, and they’re on Dean’s front porch again, which is convenient. He doesn’t bother with the chairs, just drops down onto one of the steps, and tugs Cas’s hand, pulls him down next to him.

“So,” he says, as they’re sitting there, and he feels Cas turn and look at him, but doesn’t look away from the stars himself just yet. “Uh. The whole thing where you weren’t sure it was me because of what you were—you know. Feeling. Or, uh, not feeling, I guess.”

“Yes,” Cas says, softly.

“The, um—” _Come the hell on, this isn’t that difficult,_ he tells himself, but somehow it really is. “The love.” It probably wasn’t necessary to say it; they both know at this point, but it seems important that he does say it. It would be easier not to in this moment, but maybe saying it here will make it a little easier to say again later. You know, if he needs to. Maybe it will help, just getting a sense of how the word feels in his mouth.

“Yes,” Cas says, again. And then his little finger brushes against Dean’s, and in the chilly night air the heat of it feels like a welcome. He doesn’t move it away, and after another moment or two, Dean puts his hand on top of Cas’s, and Cas turns his hand underneath Dean’s, turns the palm up, and lets Dean twine their fingers together.

He takes a deep breath, and finally says, “Maybe it wasn’t—maybe you were wrong about me. Not—I mean, I dunno. I mean, maybe you’re wrong about all that love. Maybe it wasn’t—maybe there was a reason you weren’t feeling it off me when I didn’t know you were there.”

“Oh?” From the corner of his eye, he can see that Cas is still just looking at him. Dean looks over just long enough to catch the naked, open curiosity on his face, like he really doesn’t know where Dean might be going with this, and it makes his stomach seem to swoop for a second. Dean can’t keep looking at him, not if he’s gonna have any chance of actually saying this, and he drops his gaze to their clasped hands.

“I just mean maybe—maybe it was something more specific, you know? Like— _for_ someone specific. Maybe—maybe it was just because I was—or because I _am_ —maybe it was for you. You know?” Great job, Winchester. Truly the stuff of legends.

And Cas laughs. Just a little. Not mean or irritated or anything like that; it’s just happy, a low, delighted chuckle, barely more than a hum. “Yes,” he says. “To be honest, I had started to wonder.”

“You knew?” Dean says, a little annoyed. “Well, then, what the hell are you letting me make an idiot of myself for?”

“Did _you_ know?” Cas asks.

“I—” Shit. That’s actually a pretty good question. Dean stares at their hands for another few seconds, and somehow, when he starts talking again, it’s one of the hardest things he’s ever done, but it’s also one of the easiest. “I know—I knew you were important to me. From the beginning, even when I was afraid of you and what you could do to me. I knew there was something—you’ve been really important to me for a long time. And I think—I think I knew there was something different about it. That you mattered to me in a way that was different. But I didn’t—I don’t know,” he says. “I only let myself think about it a little, and when I did, I just figured you couldn’t—because you were an angel, and I was just me, and—God. I’m an idiot. I’m sorry.”

“I’ve asked you not to talk about yourself like that,” Cas says calmly, and he lifts Dean’s hand, presses his mouth to the back of it.

“Yeah,” Dean says, and he makes the mistake of catching Cas’s eyes, and anything he might have been about to say just sort of sizzles away, like drops of water on a hot pan. But for once that sense of the unknown doesn’t feel awful, doesn’t make him feel panicked. Instead, it feels bright and exciting. Not like he’s scrabbling desperately for any words at all, but like there are just so damn many that he doesn’t know how to choose from among them. In a rush, it tumbles out of him—“I love you. You do know that, right?”

“Yes.” Cas is still smiling at their clasped hands, but at last, he looks over at Dean. “But thank you for saying it.”

“Yeah,” Dean says. And then he adds, “Look, I know heaven’s still kind of a work in progress, and Jack’s making new angels and you’re gonna have to help show them the ropes and all. You’re the one who’s still got a real job, and I pretty much just have to sit around all day looking pretty. So I get that you might have to take off now and then. But you need to know—whenever you have to go do your angel thing, or whatever, and if it’s not something I can help with—as soon as you’re done, you can come back here. I want you to come back here,” he manages, at last, and he’s only a little embarrassed by how the words come out kind of shaky. “Home. With me.”

“You are my home,” Cas says. He doesn’t even hesitate, just says it like it’s a fact, like it’s as true as the stars. “I think you always were. Even before I knew you, before my first glimpse of your soul in Hell. I thought I knew my home, my family, my purpose. But even now, I think the fact of you, the gravity of you, is reaching back and reshaping it. Wherever I go, in the end, you’re the home that will pull me back.”

“Oh, holy shit,” Dean says to that. “Dude, holy shit.” And he laughs as he says it, giddy, because holy shit. “Man, I’m barely managing to be romantic by the skin of my teeth and you’re just tossing off friggin’ poetry. All right, well, like I said, I’m just here to sit around looking pretty. I can lean into being your trophy boyfriend.”

“You _are_ very pretty,” Cas agrees, solemnly.

Dean smirks. “You’re goddamn right I am.” And first, he just leans over to kiss Cas, and then, because he’s just so fucking happy, because it feels like it’s gonna start bursting out of him at the seams if he doesn’t do something with it, he just climbs right into Cas’s lap, straddles him for a better angle as he kisses him. “You’re not too bad yourself.”

“I’ve been told that as celestial creatures go, I’m relatively attractive,” Cas says.

Which brings to mind something Dean’s been thinking of, off and on, since that very first blowjob, and now that the opportunity has fallen into his lap—or, arguably, when he’s clambered into the opportunity’s lap, and the opportunity is kissing the underside of his jaw—he’s not gonna waste it. “Uh, hey,” he says. “Speaking of. Your true form.”

“Yes?” Cas’s fist tightens in Dean’s hair, not quite enough to hurt but not far from it, pulls his head back just a little, exposing his throat, lengthening it, giving him more space to kiss.

“It sort of looked like you had, y’know—I mean, it’s kinda hard to tell, but. Were those, uh. Do you have tentacles?”

Cas pauses, lets go of Dean’s hair, pulls back a little. He looks sort of drugged-out, and he just kind of squints at Dean for a moment, with one of those looks like he can’t quite understand what he’s hearing, or maybe can’t quite believe he’s hearing it. Dean lifts his eyebrows suggestively, in case that’s helpful.

And then Cas’s eyes go to Dean’s mouth, and he says, low, “I do, sometimes, yes.”

“Oh, hell yeah,” Dean breathes, and he’s grinning like a goddamn maniac as he goes in to kiss Cas again.


End file.
